Emotions, Immunity, And Disease

Recent advances in immunology, clarification and the psychophysiology of stress, continued progress in the discovery of emotional factors in relation to physical disease, and the finding of apparent immunological disturbances in conjunction with mental illness lead to this attempt at a theoretical integration of the relation of stress, emotions, immunological dysfunction (especially autoimmunity), and disease, both physical and mental. At this stage, far more questions will be raised than answered. We come to this area of consideration via our own work on personality factors in rheumatoid arthritis, a disease with autoimmune features, and via collaboration with W. Jeffrey Fessel, who has done extensive work on serum protein abnormalities and autoimmunity in mental illness. This very speculative approach aims at encouraging the application of new basic medical concepts to psychiatry and at indirectly suggesting specific areas for future research. The time seems