Stress management is a very important skill in the 21st Century. As we know, stress has been terminally epidemic throughout the world. Stress causes a number of different ailments.
Purposes of Course
The purpose of the presentation is to demonstrate how stress management techniques can be applied in occupational therapy practice. The Stress-Diathesis Model is where stress is conceived as a trigger to symptoms in individuals who are vulnerable to chronic illness. For example, diathesis means vulnerability and stress is a trigger to those individuals who are vulnerable in terms of illness. It accounts for the exacerbation of symptoms. If a person has osteoarthritis, for example, a “stress trigger” can exacerbate the symptoms and worsen it. Another instance could be a person who has chronic depression, or many episodes of depression during a lifetime. Stress can be the trigger for those episodes too.
I would also like to present a Stress Management Protocol that can serve as a model to treat individuals in a group using psychoeducation methods.
Learning Objectives
One specific learning objective is to look at the psychophysiology of the stress response. Much research has been going on in the last 30 years examining exactly how stress hormones affect the brain, and their relationship to cortisol and other aspects of the stress response. I will talk about stress and its impact on disabilities and illness. I will give some examples of how stress affects depression and schizophrenia. I will also describe some of the specific stress management techniques that occupational therapists are using throughout the world. A stress management group protocol, used by occupational therapists when treating patients in groups, will be discussed. Finally, we will look at “The Relaxation Response”, the response that Herbert Benson famously wrote up in his book of the same name.
