[Social-political aspects of psychological stress]

Emotional stress is often based on defective social conditions like social isolation or the urge for maximal efficiency in production and consumption. The improvement of these social conditions and the elimination of the resulting pathogenic stress is a political task. There is a curious and unrealistic separation of responsibilities which is justified by tradition only: the social part of the therapy is abandoned to political institutions and groups whereas the psychiatrist whose therapy should be comprehensive concerns himself with individual problems only. As he neglects the noxious social circumstances and aims entirely at the social adaptation of the patient the psychiatrist denies the defectiveness of the social conditions as they are and corroborates a system which is the true cause of numerous psychiatric disturbances.