3. This book is about the current attitude of many people in the United States towards stress. It basically elaborates on the idea that we give "stress" too much of an influence, too much power. Also we take stress and individualize it rather than recognize that the stress is a universal problem with universal consequences.
4. Dana Becker has a PHD in social work and is a professor at Bryn Mawr College. She has written two other books dealing with mental health so she seems a brilliant authority on the subject.
5. Key Terms: Today's Stress-"now a protean concept whose shape-shifting properties give it tremendous versatility as a vehicle for explaining human dilemmas" (Becker 2013).
Original Stress- refers to "flight or fight" response, coined by Walter Cannon, founding father of stress research. (Becker 2013).
6. Quotes: "It's feeling stressed that causes our problems, not the situations and conditions that make us feel 'stressed out' in the first place" (Becker, 3). "As people who live a 'more stressful life' in a 'community that produces high stress hormones in people' then we're more likely to offer them psychotherapy or lifestyle advice and less likely to confront the societal problems of economic inequality and neighborhood violence" (Becker 4). "There's no amount of counseling, Kale, or yoga-even if these were available or affordable to everyone in the U.S.-that would alter the economic, political, and social forces that sustain poverty or war in the age of terrorism or...'work-family conflict'" (Becker).
7. This book should prove interesting as I believe it gives me the bigger picture I need to make my point about mental health. I think the idea of addressing the systems that cause the distress (which can lead to depression) instead of treating the resulting depression can easily be connected to Privatism and the aspects of it that are depression risk-factors. It is a neat idea Becker brings up by saying that the unfair, stressful situations are covered by depicting people as not strong enough or individually ill when it is the unfair systems that are "ill".
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