I brought my 81-year-old husband home from the hospital on Thursday. He had suffered a mild heart attack in March. This time he was in the hospital for three days and no one could figure out what was wrong. At home the next morning, he had symptoms identical to those he had had the day we had left for the Emergency Room. I, on the other hand, felt worse; my throat was scratchy and that night I developed a fever. Since we moved from Philadelphia to Ann Arbor following my 96-year-old mother’s stroke last year, my husband has been depending on me more and I have assumed the role of my mother’s sole decision-maker and advocate. As I coughed and tossed at night I tried not to think about the great unravelling that might occur if I became really sick, or even died.
Was I ‘stressed out’ in the vernacular of our time? I suppose the answer is yes. It is customary these days to describe reactions to difficult situations this way. We now rely on stress to explain the effects of everything from war to too much mail in our inbox. From 1970 to 1980, there were over 2,000 academic publications with stress in the title; from 2000 to 2010 there were over 21,000. As the historian Charles Rosenberg has pointed out, since the advent of industrialism Americans have had various ways of explaining the relationship between the fast pace of life and disease, a story of progress and pathology. Stress is now at the center of those explanations. Biomedical research focuses on the impact of stress on the immune system even though there is as yet no solid evidence of a cause-and-effect relationship between the two.
When the eighteenth-century philosopher and statesman Alexis de Tocqueville travelled to America he praised American individualism, but he also expressed the fear that eventually Americans might come to believe that “their whole destiny is in their own hands.” Many of us seem to have swallowed that belief along with our kale smoothies. In 1980, the political economist Robert Crawford coined the term “healthism” to describe how, for the middle classes, maintaining their health was fast becoming a universal responsibility and an overarching moral value.
