Stress and Place in Medical Sociology Place, Neighborhoods & Networks

Stress, Coping and social supports

Stress is considered to be a health threatening circumstance that may arise from natural occurrences or the social roles (Brown, Phil. 2008: 118). The two aspects are seen to be interrelated source of stress in the sense that they cause undesirable changes in life events. The writer is concerned with the influence the resulting stress circumstance impact on the health of an individual. This leads to the determination of measures deployed to facilitate dealing with the stress. Coping and social supports are considered as the measures used to assist in dealing with the stressful situation. Coping and social supports are expected to yield positive effects against the stressful situation. The sought positive effects are however, not realized since the supports mechanisms in turn miss out on the idealistic measures to show empathy. The intricacies involved in determining what makes coping and social supports inadequate to resolve stressful situation is omitted. This is because there are numerous circumstances that develop upon this mechanism making them inappropriate.

In this chapter, the writer's concerns fall within the assessment of the role coping and social support play on the aspect causing stress and the health outcome. For this purpose, four (4) distinctive functions are discussed highlighting supportive attributes to stress and health situation (Brown, Phil. 2008: 119). These are prevention measures, alteration, changing the meaning and management of stress symptoms.

Preventive Functions

The observation of the possibility of existence of measures to protect oneself from the stressful situation is made. The observation comes from the fact that there are people who sail through life without being...

This is achievable through preparedness and readiness to face up with the unavoidable changes in life. Further measures such as success in confronting a problem assist to prevent the occurrence of the problem or provide a mechanism of dealing with the problem. This is the case where experiencing a situation and dealing with it will assist an individual to forge measure to prevent the occurrence or resolve the situation.
Social supports are seen to be more effective than coping. This is because there is a wider net cast to facilitate learning through others' experience. Social groups act as a reference point that defines the ideal norms for approaching life situations. The individual is capacitated to learn how to approach situations in life without necessarily seeking the knowledge. The dangers of social support are also imminent since one may acquire certain character traits in a bid to conform to group standards. This is a sociological problem that is seen in social groupings where one's character is structured to reflect the group stands. Although social support is seen to be effective, it has its own inadequacies and negative effects.

Alteration of the problematic situation

Modification of the stress situation is considered as an ideal measure where the stressors are unavoidable. This modification through coping has inadequacies in resolving the stress situation since there are no accurate means of determining the ideal coping mechanism. In some instances, recognition of the apparent courses to the stress situation may be misconceived. Additionally the choice to ignore the problematic situation is a means of coping. Social support alteration of a problematic situation comes out with a deeper measure of success. The social support accuracy comes in to ease the burden likely to set in a stressful…