What do the following expressions all have in common? Worry, frustration, dejection, anger, nervousness, fear, despair, grief.  The answer is they all describe negative human emotions. When previous generations talked about their unpleasant feelings, they used these time-honoured terms, and everybody knew what they meant.

They did not use the word ‘stress’. That term was falsely extrapolated (inappropriately borrowed) from engineering by endocrinologist Hans Selye in the 1930s to describe the ill-effects on rats when they were imaginatively tortured in his Montreal laboratory. He claimed their sickness was caused by the corticosteroids of the fight-or-flight response as the animals fought to save themselves. 

Dr Selye was sponsored by the tobacco industry, who liked his research because ‘stiff upper’ was the accepted emotional style, and undue arousal was generally frowned upon (‘You’re getting hysterical Dorothy,’ slap). Even doctors were telling patients to calm down and have a Wills Whiff. 

If you take away somebody’s belief in their own sanity, they become too fragile for work

Unfortunately for science, the rats had seriously misled Dr Selye, whose English was not that good (he had confused ‘stress’ with ‘strain’ and therefore chosen the wrong inappropriate engineering term to start with). The real reason that the animals began to die was that they realised there was no escape from Selye’s experiments. They gave up. Resignation, or ‘learned helplessness’ to borrow its scientific name, shuts off the immune system and exposes the body to pathogens. In nature this is useful if you are about to be torn to bits by a predator, as it numbs the mind to impending slaughter. In normal situations it is maladaptive.

When my book The Truth About Stress was published in 2006 (and shortlisted for the MIND Book of the Year Award) the New Statesman wrote: ‘Angela Patmore is widely regarded as a heartless bitch’, as though by calling in question the stress ideology I had denied the existence of emotional suffering. As six members of my family had recently been murdered by an arsonist in Chingford, East London I would never have traduced the human heart like this. I know that grief, anger, worry and fear can sear the life out of a person. 

What The Truth About Stress did was to expose the ‘stress’ research evidence and the industry it had spawned because they were evidently harming vulnerable people. Incapacity benefit claims for emotional problems had for the first time (2004) breached the one million mark. Clearly, something was wrong with these claimants. But if they were suffering from ‘stress’, then our vast army of stress management practitioners might be expected to make them better, and on statistical evidence this was not happening.

Not happening then. Not happening now. ‘Stress management’ has grown ever more powerful, yet we have the worst mental health stats ever recorded. Government figures showed 3,582,864 people sought psychological help in 2022/23, 1,103,495 of them under 18. The UK Mental Health Bulletin reported: ‘’More than 1 in 7 UK adults say their mental health is currently either bad, or the worst it’s ever been.’ People are crying out for help and being given brain drugs they may never get off. 

The Health and Safety Executive sponsor a Stress Awareness Month (April). Workers’ feelings must be protected in ‘stress-free’ environments. Indeed, protection of feelings now ranks very high on the national political agenda. Name-calling is policed with extreme vigilance, and we may not express opinions that upset anybody.

Strange, then, that ‘stress’ is still rife. The HSE say that despite all the employer legislation, ‘Stress, depression or anxiety and musculoskeletal disorders accounted for the majority of days lost due to work-related ill health in Great Britain in 2022/23, 17.1 million and 6.6 million respectively.’ 

What exactly does ‘stress’ mean? BBC TV once filmed me unrolling a great scroll of different and opposite definitions on Paddington station, with commuters coming up to add more. The HSE have their own meaning, of course – one of literally hundreds issued by various authorities.  Some scientists use it to mean stimulus. The HSE call it an ‘adverse reaction’ to pressures and demands at work.

Whereas the NHS (Every Mind Matters) suggest: ‘Stress is something everyone feels at times, especially when dealing with change or life challenges… A little stress can be a good thing, as it helps us to get things done.’ Not according to the HSE.  Positive and negative connotations of stress ‘are not helpful as there is no such thing as good stress’. Confusingly, HSE also say ‘stress is not an illness in itself, so it is not possible to suffer from stress’.  What then was the matter with all those stress absentees in 2022/23?

Tragically, millions in the UK are waiting for help, for rescue, for therapy, for the cavalry to come.  People cannot cope. The NHS cannot cope. Millions swallow mind-bending drugs with debilitating withdrawal symptoms and potentially harmful and even fatal side-effects. Benzodiazepines, according to Prof Heather Ashton, between 1964 and 2004 were associated with 17,000 fatalities in Home Office data. An estimated 89 million antidepressants were prescribed in 2022/23 to 8.7 million patients. Rates have risen for six consecutive years. Yet antidepressants can cause akathisia, violent mental agitation that may be acted out.

Why the chemical coshing? Arguably because in difficult situations at home and at work people who desperately needed practical help or coping skills are being gaslighted and made afraid of their own physiological responses.  Their feelings are being turned into symptoms. If you take away somebody’s belief in their own sanity, they become too fragile for work. Life begins to crumble round their ears. 

So, with its bogus science and its potted endocrinology and its pseudo-medical claptrap about emotional arousal and the fight-or-flight response, the stress industry has unhinged Churchill’s ‘lion-hearted nation’. How dare this industry tell people to calm down when they face serious problems that require all their courage and intelligence. How dare it question a survival mechanism designed to galvanise people to help themselves.  How dare it suggest the human brain, the most awesome object known to science, is a defective computer that cannot handle crises and problems.

Stress management is poisoning mental health in the UK. Let’s grub it out. Root and branch.