Opinion | Stress facing Hong Kong teachers and students is a collective problem we cannot ignore
- Anson Au says though stress is often dismissed as an individual problem, studies on its characteristics show it is a huge public health danger. Stress builds up silently, induces destructive emotions and behaviour, and can even change genes
Stress among the most vulnerable in our society has not received sufficient attention from government authorities as it is largely seen as an individual problem of coping, a natural part of life that one has to overcome as part of our repertoire of “soft skills”. But multidisciplinary health research, including my own, tells us that rising levels of stress, especially among children, is actually a public health problem because of the four characteristics we’ve discovered about stress.
First, being stressed is and can become genetic. An innovative field called epigenetics has shed light on the “nature versus nurture” debate by showing that genetics and health consequences are shaped by both. A prominent article published in Nature, the world’s foremost scientific journal, shows that the health behaviour, practices and consequences we develop (“nurture”) actually become built into our genes.
Some early evidence of this comes from addiction studies dealing with alcohol and tobacco abuse, which showed that addictions were passed down. More recently, scientists are discovering that the stress we experience functions in the same manner. Stress changes our genes to make us more predisposed to being stressed. Just as important, this stress tendency can be passed down to the next generation.
Second, stress accumulates without our knowing. The conditions that cause stress to pile atop one another in a person’s mind and the roles in which they receive this stress tend to overlap. As a consequence, stress spills over across these roles as we slip between them, carrying our accumulated stress everywhere we go.
We often snort at people breaking down over simple things as signs of weakness. But a woman who breaks down over a pot on the hob boiling over may have got there through a winding journey. She may have been scolded by clients in her job as a nurse, had conflicts with the day care centre looking after her children, whom she cares for at home while dealing with the looming realities of an ill, ageing parent and student debts to be paid off. Her tears were never just about the dinner. Moreover, in a culture like ours where mental health is stigmatised, just having a mental health problem is itself a source of stress.
