Professor Heads Program On Tension-Illness Links

A professor at the School of Public Health is organizing a program aimed at reducing disease nation-wide by combining medical services with social support work, based on recently-acquired evidence that mental stress contributes to the incidence of disease.

Robert J. Haggerty, Lee Professor of Public Health, said yesterday he is coordinating the joint project by Harvard Medical School, Peter Bent Brigham Hospital and the Massachusetts Mental Health Center.

Under the program, physicians affiliated with the three institutions will interview patients at Brigham Hospital to find out if they are under stress. Those who are will be referred to the Mental Health Center, Haggerty said.

The center will then try to link up these patients with community social service organizations which may be able to help them, he said.

Haggerty spoke Tuesday at a convention of the American Public Health Association, where he presented evidence that people lacking a supportive environment at the time of a crisis are often more likely to become ill.

Common crisis that lead to serious illness are the deaths of relatives, job losses and arrests, he said.

Haggerty added that rising unemployment, disintegrating family ties and greater social mobility have caused a rise in general stress levels in the past ten years.

With increased mobility Americans feel more autonomous, but they pay a price for that feeling--a lack of social support and the stress that results from it, Haggerty said.

Haggerty said he thinks there is a need for an interdisciplinary approach to solving health problems, adding that political measures--such as providing a guaranteed income--would do much to reduce disease in America.

Haggerty said he believes that "natural support groups" like the family are probably more effective than the institutional social support organizations into which the new program will place troubled patients.

He said the program will encourage physicians, when possible, to work with these natural support groups before turning to other mutual support groups.