Stress Theory Model: General Adaptation Syndrome

Selye developed the idea of stress theory into a theoretical model called General Adaptation Syndrome. He defined stress as a nonspecific demand and response that the body makes. In order to prove his theory he studied animals exposed to negative stimuli and by doing this he found three stages of response: flight or fight, resistance, and exhaustion. At the state of exhaustion animals had or began to develop illness. This showed that prolonged exposure to negative effect produces illness. In 1967, Holmes and Rahe performed life event research to further depict on the stress theory, they looked at different life and events and how people would cope with each one of them. They found 43 different life events that are more prone to occur in an …show more content…
Yet in 1980, a West African writer by the name of Malidoma Patrice Somé came to the United States for graduate study, and one of the things that struck him was how we deal with mental illnesses. He was born into the Dagara people, people who look at mental illness as “good news from the other world”. They believe that the person who has a “mental illness” is really someone who's been chosen as a medium to communicate important messages from the spirit realm to ours. Dr. Somé states that “Mental disorder, or any behavioral disorder of all kinds, signal the fact that two obviously incompatible energies have merged into the same field.” When the person doesn't get assistance in dealing with the energy from the spirit realm, many disruptions and disturbances occur as the …show more content…
“I was so shocked. That was the first time I was brought face to face with what is done here to people exhibiting the same symptoms I’ve seen in my village.” stated Dr. Somé. He was shocked to see that the symptoms seen in patients were similar to those he experienced back in his hometown. Western culture is discouraged, rather than encouraged. He saw the way we treat patients as a waste. “So this is how the healers who are attempting to be born are treated in this culture. What a loss! What a loss that a person who is finally being aligned with a power from the other world is just being wasted.” Dr. Somé saw beings and entities invisible to us but visible to shamans and psychics that were hanging around the patients. He states that they were trying to extract the medications and their effects out of the bodies of the patients in order to merge with them, but, in the process, it greatly increased the pain the patients were dealing with. He states that the entities were very fierce and determined to remove the medications and their effects. The patients that the entities were doing this to were screaming and yelling, making the environment extremely negative, resulting in Dr. Somé having to