The Myth of Normal 39

decades after women experience a traumatic event.” The more severe the trauma symptoms, the more aggressive the cancer proved to be. This Harvard research provided further striking evidence that emotional stresses are inseparable from the physical states of our bodies, in illness and health. Already in previous work, depression had been associated with elevated ovarian cancer risk. The impact of stress had also been studied: among lab mice with ovarian cancer cells injected into their abdominal cavities, those subjected to emotional aggravation such as being physically restrained or isolated had much greater incidence of tumor growth and spread than socially housed animals that were not restrained. [11] The Harvard scientists theorized that stress can “promote ovarian cancer development by inhibiting key defenses against unrestrained cell growth.” In other words, stress may disable our immune systems’ capacity to control and eliminate malignancy. The implications extend far beyond PTSD, since, in our culture, stress and trauma affect many people who do not qualify for that diagnosis. Finnish researchers, writing in the British Journal of Psychiatry in 2005, found, quite remarkably, that people undergoing “life events”—relatively ordinary stresses and emotional losses such as relationship issues and work problems that would not qualify them for a formal diagnosis—suffered more PTSD- like symptoms such as bad dreams or emotional numbing than more obviously traumatized people who had endured war or disaster. [12] The Harvard paper on ovarian cancer pointed to some promising possibilities for treatment, suggesting that women whose PTSD symptoms had abated, perhaps due to effective psychotherapy, had less risk for malignancy than women with active symptoms. It is exciting to contemplate the preventive and healing potentials, as well as the social implications, of a wellness perspective that treats emotions like the real and relevant “things” they are. While all this is timely and the science freshly minted, the principles are not new. In a 1939 lecture to a graduating medical class, published in the Journal of the American Medical Association ( JAMA), Dr. Soma Weiss informed his audience that “social and psychic factors play a role in every