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Stress has become a high-profile cultural catchall which is infecting every facet of British life. And Claire Fox isn't impressed Have you settled back into work, full of enthusiasm for the challenges of 2007? Or are you, like so many people, already stressed out? I don't expect the Christmas holidays helped. In the build-up to the festive season, endless miserablist articles told us ‘anxious emotions become ever-more intense over the Christmas holidays'. Headlines in December proclaimed that we are ‘Wound-up Britain – the stress capital of the world'. We rank highest in 10 countries in the stress league. As local authorities know all too well, over the last 15 years, it is workplace stress which has gained prominence. This is illustrated by the rising number of court cases where employees sue their authority for failing to protect their health from excessive stress. But is life more stressful than in the past? Surely life and work are less difficult than in the days of our parents and grandparents. Few of us live in abject poverty, go down mines, send our children up chimneys or wash clothes by hand. Yet the perception exists that stress levels are rising. However, as Dr Ken McLaughlin, a senior lecturer in social work at Manchester Metropolitan University argues, it's impossible to make a historic comparison, as the discourse of stress is a recent phenomenon. Less than 20 years ago, working hours, lack of resources or understaffing, were seen as political issues to be resolved collectively. The psychological syndrome ‘stress' was rarely mentioned. Often, what is complained about today isn't new. However these same issues have become medicalised, re-interpreted as individualised problems of employees' health. And the solutions are also novel. Therapeutic interventions to improve our mental wellbeing are now commonplace at work. The new legislative framework around work-related stress means authorities have keenly implemented stress management schemes to identify ‘stress-inducing factors', and to ‘develop staff awareness of its causes and symptoms'. But awareness campaigns – with their all-pervasive ‘stress risk assessments' and ‘workplace stressor monitoring' – can have their downsides. The more stress is given prominence, the more council employees are being taught to regurgitate a pre-written script and encouraged to articulate everything, from minor gripes to serious workplace problems, through the prism of stress. This process is aided by a lack of clarity about what exactly stress is. As David Wainright and Michael Calnan show through in their excellent Work stress: The making of a modern epidemic, definitions of stress are contentious, contradictory, woolly and various. But rather than a precisely-defined syndrome, stress is real as a cultural phenomenon, increasingly internalised and free-floating. It is telling and shocking that stress is such a high-profile cultural catchall that even children make sense of their problems through the jargon. A recent survey discovered that children as young as eight described themselves as ‘stressed out by relationships and school'. Professor Stephen Palmer, at City University, who led the study, was ‘surprised by the extent of the problem... If you asked eight-year-olds about stress 20 years ago, they would have looked blank'. Expressing the strains of modern life through the language of stress depends on learning that language – and there are plenty of people who are only too willing to teach us. We might not yet have caught up with the US, where counsellors now outnumber librarians, fire-fighters, postmen and dentists, but we are certainly in thrall to the stress pundits. According to Angela Patmore, author of The truth about stress, de-stressing has become a multimillion-pound industry. Between 1991 and 2003, the number of accredited stress counsellors increased by 804%. So – New Year's resolution for councils – don't add to the glut of stress-managers – they are only stressing us out – CHILL!

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We're too stressed about stress

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