Stress and Coping Lesson Reflection. Alternative Settings and The Consumer/Survivor/Ex-Patient Movement

The paper should be written in the first-person voice (i.e., use “I”). Be sure to write in full, complete sentences. You will be graded for content and quality of writing. Reflect on what you have learned in this course about experiences by many Aboriginal community members (e.g., discrimination, poverty) and how it relates to the ecological model of stress.
Part 1: Aboriginal community members and stress
Identify and explain 2 distal contextual factors and 1 proximal stressor likely to be experienced by Aboriginal community members.
Part 2: Interventions to promote coping
Propose and describe interventions to address the distal contextual factors and the proximal stressor identified in part 1.
Lesson Material:
Lesson 7: Stress and Coping
Section One: Introduction
Welcome to Lesson 7 on stress and coping. Hearing that this lesson will be (in part) about stress may have made some of you remember other psychology classes – at least your Introduction to Psychology Class. I am pretty sure that the course covered the topic of stress in some form or another. Likely, you have been told that stress is harmful, how it affects people’s ability to function and how to address stress. This lesson about stress is a bit of a different lesson because in community psychology we look at stress from different perspectives.
After completing this unit, you will:
Recognize your own level of stress as a student
Recognize contextual issues such as job insecurity as a stressor
Explain the relationship between social and cultural marginalization and stress
Describe the ecological-contextual model of stress and coping
Articulate the difference between a traditional concept of stress and coping and a contextual concept of stress responses
Articulate the history and characteristics of alternative settings
Explain the difference between professional mental health services and consumer-run organizations
Let’s go back and review those concepts you learned about related to stress and coping. Here are a couple of definitions from Wood, Wood, Boyd, Wood and Desmarais (2011).
Stressors: “any event capable of producing physical or emotional stress” (p. 337)
Stress: “the physiological and psychological response to a condition that threatens or challenges a person and requires some form of adaptation or adjustment” (p. 337)
Coping: “efforts through action and thought to deal with demands that are perceived as taxing or overwhelming” (p. 343)
Many of you will also have seen different concepts of stress including Hans Selye’s General Adaptation Syndrome or the Lazarus and Folkman’s psychological model of stress (see for example Wood et al, 2011). For example, one important aspect of the latter model is that the perception of the stressor is more important than the stressor. That is, the way we perceive and appraise a stressor is more significant than what created the stress in the first place.
This is simple to understand if you think back to a situation when a friend of yours experienced the same stressor (e.g., having to present in front of class) but didn’t seem to be fazed by it as much as you did – or the other way around. Ever wonder why this is? In the case of the presentation, do you think it is because of a genetic/personality trait or experience/practice?
So how do people tend to cope with stress? Psychology suggests that there are two types of coping mechanisms: problem focused and emotion focused. Problem focused coping is about responses that change or remove the source of stress (e.g., removing oneself, seeking professional help, getting help from others) while emotion focused coping is about responses that lower the emotional influence of the source of stress (e.g., viewing the stressor as an opportunity, denial, prayer).
While we go through this lesson, keep these concepts in mind as a foundation for understanding stress and coping in the community psychology way – from a perspective that focusses on issues that are strongly related to context rather than the individual.
However, before we dive into stress and coping from a conceptual model and look at it through a community psychology perspective, I’d like you to complete the Student Stress Scale. This tool was developed by Insel and Roth (1985) and later adapted/expanded by Wood et al., (2011) for their psychology textbook.
Please take a moment to complete the Student Stress Scale by clicking on this link.
Stress and Community:
Now that you remember some of the core concepts of stress and thought about your own stress, let’s expand our horizons a bit by watching a video by Kelly McGonigal a health psychologist who teaches at Stanford University.
Before you start watching the video, I want to point out something about the Ted Talk. There are really two parts to the Ted Talk. The first one is about how stress is actually good for us if we change the way we think about stress – suggesting we can in fact become healthier thanks to stress. While interesting for sure (and counterintuitive for that matter), it is not the part that I would like you to pay particular attention to. You may ask yourself, why? The answer is quite simple - because the second part is more relevant to community psychology.
As you will see, around the seventh minute in the Ted Talk, Kelly McGonigal starts talking about – you guessed it – the link between stress and our social environment. That is, how stress makes the person social. Ok, enough said. Please watch the Ted Talk by Kelly McGonigal called “How to make stress your friend” (14 minutes).
Stress and Context
So far, we have looked at one aspect of stress and coping: how stress makes us more social and how caring for others creates resilience to stress. There is, however, an important flipside to stress and context. The context itself not only creates coping mechanisms but is also full of stressors.
While there are situations that create direct and immediate stress such as catastrophic events (for instance, the recent earthquake in Nepal on April 25, 2015), major life events (e.g., job loss, breakup with your partner, losing a loved one) and life transitions (e.g., new school, moving), a good number of stressors are surface manifestation of problems and are rooted in historical and structural issues such as oppression and inequality. If you have paid attention to what we have covered in the lessons to date, you will recognize that many issues such as poverty, child hunger, social and cultural marginalization, and inequality can create a lot of stress. Generally, these tend to be overlooked – but not in community psychology, as you will see shortly.
Let’s explore this some more using the example of employment and work quality.
A Community Psychology View of Stress, Coping, Coping Resources and Possible Outcomes
According to Wood et al (2011) “our physical and psychological well-being is profoundly influenced by the degree to which we feel a sense of control over our lives” (p. 340) suggesting that there is a relationship between our sense of agency and control over sources of stress and our wellbeing or level of stress.
Is it possible to have agency over things like racism, discrimination and poverty? Probably not. And here is where community psychology is interested in focusing on the context. Recall the quote by Geoffrey Nelson and Isaac Prilleltensky (2010):
“It is important to make a distinction between the surface manifestations of problems, such as mental health problems, school underachievement and crime and the root causes of those surface manifestations … These historical and structural problems are all characterized by oppression and power inequality between groups of people” (p. 31).
Community psychology differs with regards to earlier conceptions of stress, stressors, and coping because it takes a closer look at contextual aspects. Barbara Dohrenwend (1978) developed a model of stress that integrates both individual and contextual (environmental, political) factors in understanding how we respond to, and cope with, stressors. Successfully coping with stress depends on the balance of positive and negative contextual influences and personal characteristics. Similarly, according to Bret Kloos, Jean Hill, Elizabeth Thomas, Abraham Wandersman, Maurice Elias, and James Dalton (2012), “a community psychology view of stress, coping, coping resources, and possible outcomes emphasize how persons are embedded in multiple contexts” (p. 251). To help you understand this idea better, I would like for you to read 17 pages from their book.
Please note that your upcoming comprehension quiz will focus on the material covered in this reading.
Section Two: Alternative Settings and The Consumer/Survivor/Ex-Patient Movement
Let’s move from stress and coping to a particular way of coping: alternative settings.
According to Nelson and Prilleltensky (2010), “alternative settings are voluntary associations that are created and controlled by people who share a problem or an oppressive condition.” (p. 164).
Perspectives from Consumer/Survivors/Ex-Patients
The final part of this lecture is about the perspectives of two local people who have struggled with mental illness and were important in the Canadian consumer/survivor movement. The first one is Pat Capponi. Pat Capponi is a Toronto author and advocate for mental health issues. Pat was awarded the Order of Canada and is a co-facilitator of an initiative of the Centre for Addiction & Mental Health called From Surviving to Advising which pairs psychiatry residents with ‘experts by experience’; that is consumer / survivors to increase mutual growth and understanding.
To help you understand this idea better, I would like for you to read 7 pages from her book.