A Conceptual Overview: Stress, Coping, And Health

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Stress, Coping, and Health
A Conceptual Overview
Brenda L. Lyon

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lthough the term stress as it relates to the human condition has been in the scientific literature since the 1930s and in the nursing literature since the late 1950s, the word did not become popular vernacular until the late 1970s and early 1980s. Today, the term is used in everyday vocabulary to capture a variety of human experiences that are disturbing or disruptive in some manner: “You wouldn’t believe how much stress I had today!” “I was really stressed out.”
Subjective sensations commonly experienced in conjunction with “feeling stressed” are headache, shortness of breath, light-headedness or dizziness, nausea, muscle tension, fatigue, gnawing in
The first is that discipline-specific health perspectives partition the holistic phenomenon of health in such a manner that the whole picture of the human condition and how persons feel and are doing is lost. The second is that too often the discipline’s perspective on health is adopted by other disciplines when there is not a good match in terms of the disciplines’ philosophical presuppositions and social mandate. An excellent example is the nursing field adopting the medical model definition of health as the absence of disease. A third problem is that the acceptance of a disciplinespecific view of health by policy-making groups necessarily leads to health policy decisions that may not be in the best interest of the population as a whole.
The Biomedical View of Health
The most popular and widely held view of health is the biomedical one. Medicine has traditionally viewed health from an objective stance and defines it as the absence of disease or discernible pathology and defines illness as the presence of same (Engel, 1992; Kleinman, 1981;
Millstein & Irwin, 1987). On the basis of this perspective, medicine’s social mandate has been the diagnosis and treatment of disease.
Nursing’s View of Health
Nursing has been critical of the narrow confines of the biomedical model as a perspective for nursing and its adoption by government agencies (Hall & Allan, 1987; Leininger, 1994;
Lyon, 1990). Many nurses in practice and nurse educators, however, commonly adopt the biomedical view and equate illness and disease using the terms interchangeably. Likewise, concepts of health and wellness are used interchangeably, logically resulting in the conclusion that persons who have chronic diseases are not and cannot be described as well. Because health and wellness are targeted outcomes, it is imperative that nursing be clear on how it defines these concepts. This is particularly important in developing theoretical models linking stress, coping, and health that can serve as a framework for nursing research and practice. Nursing must define health in a manner that (a) is consistent with its philosophical presuppositions,
(b) is measurable, (c) is empirically based, and
(d) captures outcomes that are sensitive to nursing interventions or therapeutics.
Currently, there is little unity regarding