Stress: A Keyword for Today?

Stress: A Keyword for Today?Stress may not prove a keyword, but it emphatically colors our current moment and the last half century.Take as a landmark the psychiatric legitimation in 1980 of post-traumatic stress disorder.Stress has a range of quite precise meanings and usages, but its burgeoning usage comes from all the ways it links mind and body, in reciprocal discomfort.Stress may provide the successor to what W. H. Auden in 1947 termed The Age of Anxiety, but I have not yet encountered a comparably powerful cultural, let alone literary, marker.As I began work for this investigation, I found in my daily online newspaper reading [Headline]: 'Flight cancellations stressing weary travelers as July 4 approaches' (Washington Post, June 28, 2022).In a New York Times 'Mind' feature, 'Stress might age the immune system, new study finds' (June 17, 2022), and in the 'Well' feature, 'Why Dogs Can Be So Healing for Kids: A new study suggests that spending time with therapy dogs may help lower children's stress levels even more than relaxation exercises'.This random chrestomathy illustrates the term's flexible grammar, functioning as an active verb, noun, and adjective.The nominalized adjective formed from the verb features in a fine OED citation from the National Post: 'Headlines tout vitamin drips as a cure-all for the stressed, the anxious, the depressed, the dehydrated, the immune-weakened and the overweight' (Canada, 2015).A striking biographical anecdote concerns the physiologist Hans Selye, whose work had a huge impact on the word's twentieth-century course.As a medical student in the 1920s, Selye observed during ward rounds that patients often had numerous complaints in common, even though suffering from different and distinct diseases.Medical science taught that signs and symptoms are specific to a particular illness; Selye recounted how one of his teachers would make the correct diagnosis in each of five different patients, solely on the basis of their presenting history and physical findings.Ignored, however, were the generic complaints that all those patients had in common, such as feeling tired, having no appetite, losing weight, preferring to lie down rather than stand, and not being in the mood to go to work.He called it the

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