Question:
My wife has been selected by her employers (The National Health Service) to
attend a half-semester course (one lecture per week) on Stress Management,
to be held at Leeds University. She has already started to read one of the
recommended books on the subject, "The Truth About Stress", by Angela
Patmore, Atlantic Books, 2006. I have managed to snatch the book from time
to time, and have only read a few extracts.
Answer:
1 "functions rather like a church" seems the weakest
link in this chain of reasoning. Most investigators see
no likeness between stress management doctrine for
business use and either church organization or theology.
The current business doctrine looks more like modern
marketing techniques than any church. It also fits into
a pattern in collegiate "management science," viz. the
transformation of experience in successful business
management into disciplinarized knowledge that defines
a field for both "research" and academic credentials,
and then in turn generates a popularized version, for
customers who do not have the time to approach it
in the collegiate environment.
2. There are probably still differences between
current American and current British doctrines of
stress management in business, both nowadays equally far
from the source (physiologist Hans Selye 50 years ago.)
Is your wife being sent on the course to learn to manage her own stress
or that of other people?
I was once sent on a compulsory one-day stress management course. Early
in the day the occupational nurse who was running it asked people to
rate their stress levels on a scale of 1 to 10 (1 being the lowest)
comparing the previous day and their current level. Everyone else gave
high numbers for the day before and low for the present, except for me.
I explained that I had been quite relaxed the previous day but having to
come on the course had made me feel very stressed. She tactfully
suggested that I might like to leave at the coffee break and promised
not to tell on me.
Hearing of this, a colleague asserted that I didn't suffer from stress
but was obviously a carrier. Rather unkind, I thought.
That of other people. She is a Health Visitor, responsible for advising
mothers of new-born children (up to the age of 5) on the health aspects both
of the mothers themselves, and of their very young. This includes subjects
as diverse as immunisations and post-natal depression. From the point of
view of her employers, my wife's course on Stress is directed at the latter.
I find myself already wondering whether Ms Patmore would claim that the term
"post-natal depression" is as poorly defined as "stress" is.
