19 Years Ago In TIME

By Elizabeth L. Bland, Benjamin Nugent, Roy B. White, Rebecca Winters

War, recession, fighting with HMOs--these are worrisome times, to be sure. But Americans have felt STRESSED before, as TIME noted in a 1983 cover story that focused on the ways Americans were finding to relax.

In the past 30 years, doctors and health officials have come to realize how heavy a toll stress is taking on the nation's well-being. According to the American Academy of Family Physicians, two-thirds of office visits to family doctors are prompted by stress-related symptoms. At the same time, leaders of industry have become alarmed by the huge cost of such symptoms in absenteeism, company medical expenses and lost productivity...It is a sorry sign of the times that the three best-selling drugs in the country are an ulcer medication (Tagamet), a hypertension drug (Inderal) and a tranquilizer (Valium)...No one really knows if there is more stress now than in the past, but many experts believe it has become more pervasive. "We live in a world of uncertainties," says Harvard's [Herbert] Benson, "everything from nuclear threat to job insecurity to the near assassination of the President to the lacing of medicines with poisons." Through television, these problems loom up under our very noses and yet, says Psychologist Kenneth Dychtwald of Berkeley, Calif., the proximity only frustrates us: "We can't fight back with those people on TV."

--TIME, June 6, 1983