Hans Selye is the proponent of one of the earliest theories linking stress and illness together via endocrine processes. Selye believes that any perceived threat would elicit a certain response from the body’s system of defenses. Selye’s general adaptation syndrome illustrates the processes that the body undergoes when faced with some sort of noxious stimulus, and when adaptation is long-drawn-out, the adaptation may lead to disease.With Selye’s theory, Selye proposed three stages to occur: the alarm reaction, stage of resistance, and stage of exhaustion (Friedman, 2002, p. 35).
With these stages, one would undergo a process of stimulation, would choose the fight response, and if the challenge persists, exhaustion along with depression and illness comes about. Selye argued that a wide variety of diseases could come about with prolonged defense against certain noxious stimuli. As for the type of disease to develop with prolonged defense, it varies from person to person.Usually, the case of diathesis applies, wherein diathesis is one’s genetic predisposition to disease (Friedman, 2002, p.
36). However, though Selye stresses that prolonged defense with struggling against a noxious stimulus develops an illness, his model did not explicitly show how the said defense does so. What Selye did show was how adrenal-cortical hormones play an important role in his theory. Selye made use of an experiment wherein he repeatedly pulled test rats’ tails.
Upon, sacrificing them and studying them, Selye found that the rats’ adrenal glands we affected, usually even enlarged. With his findings, he hypothesized that with excessive activation of the adrenal system, the body neglects other processes which causes it to succumb to disease. Today, two of Selye’s basic points have been proven, adreno-cortical hormones are, indeed, important to stress response and, stress truly lowers bodily resistance but in a more complicated way than what has been believed (Friedman, 2002, p. 37).
