ABSTRACT
Stress has become a generally accepted link in the etiological process of mental illness, particularly after the notion of anxiety became regarded as a basic component of the psychoneuroses. It has become almost traditional to regard three somewhat nebulous groups of etiological agents in the causation or etiology of mental disease: the biological, the psychological, and the social. The interplay of these sets of factors in the etiology of mental illness is generally accepted. The foregoing theoretical model in which social and personal predisposing and precipitating factors are delineated as conducive to psychopathology and mental illness implies that social and psychological stresses are operating in all of these factors. N. A. Cameron also lists several major precipitating factors common to all psychoses, each of which is essentially a stress condition: loss or threatened loss of a major source of gratification; loss or threatened loss of basic security; and an upsurge of erotic or hostile drive.
