Stress Is Not a Short Term Event

I think we are outfitted with inbuilt mechanisms to handle adverse events—stress.  But let’s be clear what stress is. It is not falling off your bicycle.  Or even breaking your leg.   Stress occurs when the event exceeds our coping mechanisms; when we no longer are able to integrate it and go on with life.  It usually happens in two ways; either the trauma happens so early and so life endangering, as very early traumas can be, overwhelming our defenses; or, it becomes a permanent event that wears down the various systems of the body over time.  It is usually the permanence of stress that is the culprit.

This has some scientific backing:  a new study in Germany (Dr. Georg Juckel) documented how long-lasting stress produced mental illness (see http://rubin.rub.de/en/featured-topic-stress/mental-disorders or http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/11/141121082907.htm). The measured prolonged stress as it effects the immune system.  They concentrated on certain phagocytes (microglia). They help repair nerve cells; except, except, when they are overtaxed. Then they become  destructive.   That is when stress, having gone on too long, becomes its antagonist.  In other words, our initial repair mechanisms  turn into their opposite when stress goes on too long.  As we know, there is just so much we can take.  So those microglia cells now produce inflammation instead of reducing it.   Our good protective friend becomes our enemy. It says, “You asked too much of me and I can’t do it any more.”

When the triggering even goes on and on the destructive forces remain and do their damage.  They found that it wasn’t the trauma along that was the guilty party but how that trauma was embedded on deeper trauma:   those who were under trauma were many times more likely to develop mental illness later on if there was a history of severe infections during early gestation; especially true during the embryonic period.   We need to investigate the gestalt of entire panoply of illness; not just a single factor.  When trauma is compounded, the mother has a series of ailments or drinks alcohol or smokes from the start of pregnancy,  there can be serious effects later on, not the least of which are severe allergies.    I have reported on a patient with such heavy afflictions. She explained to me that her parents fought all the time during the pregnancy, finally ending in divorce in her seventh month.  My patient felt it all and seemed sure that all of the chronic battles affected her immune system.  She made constant runs to the emergency services in her community.

What is crucial here is that the embryonic state helps shape the newly developing immune system.  When there is severe influenza during this period the baby may well suffer later from all sorts of immune diseases, not the least of which may be the catastrophic diseases much later in life; and who could dream that those illnesses got their start during the embryonic period?    Above all, it is the chronicity of the trauma, the unrelenting terrible input, that does us in.   One sure thing, is the mother’s constant smoking; another is her chronic depression or anxiety.  They exist during the embryonic period and have very long-lasting effects.

I had chronic allergies as a kid, went to doctor after doctor to try to figure it all out.  But they were looking in the wrong place; they should have looked into my brain and the brain of my childhood.  There was the answer. And when I got out of the house all allergies stopped.  Today I have no allergies at all.    I do believe that allergy specialists need to reduce their immune studies and talk to their patients about their early life.  How was gestation?  And birth? Many drugs given?  I believe they will find many more answers there than in the allergy tests they study.

But isn’t all this self evident?  Pipe smokers who pass hot smoke over their lips and jaws often suffer cancer of those areas.  Remember Freud with his jaw cancer?  It is the constant friction, the assault and insult that does it all.   We are built to withstand just so much and then the body gives up.  It did what it could and it was not enough.