ABSTRACT
Despite the widespread lay perception that psychosocial stress is a cause of ill health and death, acceptance of its relevance as a preventive target among scientists, medics and policy makers has been slow to gain traction. This reticence has centred on problems of perception (e.g. ‘everybody is stressed’; ‘one person’s stressor is another person’s stimulus’), measurement, the potential for reverse causation bias (existing ill health is the cause of the stress), inconsistent findings, and lack of effective strategies to mitigate stress. In this chapter, we weigh the strength of evidence on work-related psychosocial stress as a risk factor for two disorders with major public health importance, cardiovascular disease and depression. Pooling of data sets into mega studies has boosted progress in this field of research as such studies generally avoid findings occurring by chance only. Nonetheless, even large sample sizes cannot rule out the possibility of confounding and other threats to validity. We conclude this chapter by describing our view of the future directions for this field of research.
