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behavioral-endocrine-genetic approach to stress problems that I think
still offers, much more so now than then with recent advances in gen
etics, a promising opportunity for mental health research. We pursued
that at Stanford University, particularly with the excellent work of
Barchas and Roland Ciaranello.
There was in the 1950s an interesting possibility that abnormal con
centrations of steroids might affect brain function adversely under highly
stressful conditions, particularly if there were genetically determined
abnormalities in steroid hormone synthesis, transport, or disposal. There
is considerable evidence that a variety of fat-soluble steroids have access
to the brain and many produce neurophysiological, pharmacological,
and behavioral effects. This line of inquiry has been fruitfully pursued
in Bruce McEwen’s laboratory at Rockefeller University in the past
couple of decades.
Another aspect of this problem area is stress-related coping and
adaptation. Psychological responses to stressful experiences are central
to the work of most psychiatrists. Hence, the psychiatric literature has
provided abundant documentation of the ways in which many common
experiences can be traumatic. Some of these are inherent components
of the life cycle; others are major features of urbanized, industrialized
societies. Many kinds of difficult experiences have been described in
psychiatric clinical practice that have adverse effects.
What do humans typically do in the face of painful elements of
experience? The psychiatric literature and that of closely related fields
in the 1950s mainly gave the impression that what we did was to avoid
the painful elements at all costs, reject them as part of ourselves, even
if this required extensive self-deception. The classical mechanisms of
defense functioned largely in this way, being centrally concerned with
minimizing recognition of potentially distressing aspects of personal
experience. They relied heavily upon avoidance and reduction of in
formation. That seemed strange to me, coming from a background in
evolutionary biology. It was hard for me to see how human adaptation
could be based essentially on the reduction of information and par
ticularly the avoidance of information that was more or less life-
threatening in character. I could see how that might be true sometimes
under some circumstances, but I could not see how that could characterize