| Abstract: | Stress management programmes have become a feature of workplace training programmes and health-related activities. What they expect to achieve, or how, is not always clear. Positivistic science and medicine has difficulty with the complexities of involved human experiences. The value systems of the individual, the organization, and the society interact in complex and powerful ways, forming an inner reality which demands new ways of study and understanding. Stress management intervention has to be seen not only as an attack on disease but also as a vehicle for promoting organizational and individual well-being. Doctors going into these areas must realize they are entering a higher-order system and thereby changing their tracitional professional role, and that their results will be measured against different criteria. Competition for scarce resources, and perhaps hostility from management, will be new experiences. Management will have a different world view and this has to be recognized and respected. Mutual interests must be identified. A formula might be: ‘health in the individual is health in the organization and vice versa’. The theoretical models of stress and the approaches currently used in stress management programmes will be reviewed critically in an attempt to break the constraints of illness-dominated thinking and to envisage their potential for positive health and personal development. The case of ‘the healthy back’ will be taken as an example of this wider health-promoting model. |
