‘Be honest about stress-related issues’

Many Jamaicans face stressful situations in their every day interactions with co-workers, family members, employees, and employers without realising what is causing them to react or deal with certain situations in violent or abusive ways.

In making this declaration during Wednesday’s ‘Farm the Future’ symposium hosted by Youth for Excellence Limited in collaboration with the Rose Town Foundation for the Built Environment and the Rural Agricultural Development Authority, Executive Director of the Foundation, Ruth Jankee, admitted that she was a victim of stress.

“How you head feel? You head good? Talk the truth. My head nuh so good sometimes. Sometimes me get up and mi don’t feel suh good because mi start stress over what going to happen with this and that. Suppose them call and say me can’t come work through gunshot a fire? All of us are under stress and we recognise that and we want to encourage people to recognise it,” she said, urging people to be honest about stress-related issues.

“No badda say, ‘Yea, man, I’m fine’ when you know that sometimes you not so fine.”

In recognition of this reality, the Rose Town Foundation is working on a programme to educate people about recognising the symptoms of stress and how to reduce it. Come next year, it will begin offering counselling services, in tandem with the yoga classes that it now offers. It will bring in specialists to share information on things such as menopause and other issues, which women have to deal with but sometimes don’t understand.

“Things such as teenage pregnancy. If you think you are pregnant, what are you going to do? We want to encourage people to talk because we recognise the importance of things that people are going through, and we want to help them find out what stressors are causing them to behave in certain ways,” Jankee explained.

“You remember one time when somebody step pon yuh toe and they say sorry and you all right? Now, dem step pon you toe, and is wah? War and death. So learning about these things and understanding that all of us are under stress is important. Whether it is personal, environmental, or national, we are all under stress. We have counsellors coming in next year, so listen out for that, and we’ll see what we can do to get people to deal with the stressors that we are all under.”

In a January 2011 article, family physician Dr Pauline Williams Green pointed out that stress can raise blood pressure levels and that there is an association between the stresses of low socioeconomic status and hypertension.