Chronic Stress/Fear Increases Susceptibility to Potentially Lethal Infections

How Psychological Distress Negatively Impacts Immune Function

I was going to write a post on how the weather affects our health and wellbeing, but an important article I shared to facebook a year ago came up again this morning. Since this follows neatly on from my recent post,

The Insidious Impacts of Institutionalized Fear Mongering

I felt like it was worth covering the article here too. Here is a link to the science journal article in question:

The below quote is from the introduction to the article.

“Excessive or prolonged psychological stress compromises several physiological systems, which might increase susceptibility to disease. Strong evidence from animal models and human studies suggests a considerable modulation of the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis in response to stress, with altered biological functions such as compromised immunity (eg, impaired humoral and cell mediated immunity) and increased inflammatory reactivity.

This was a Swedish study on a very large population with matched controls to eliminate confounders. They find that folks with PTSD and other stress related conditions, have statistically significantly increased risk of infections to potentially lethal pathogens. The results were clear and just go to emphasize what we already know from many other studies:

“this study found an association between stress related disorders and risk of life threatening infections, including sepsis, endocarditis, central nervous system infections, and fatal infections of any other origin… the association was more pronounced among people with a diagnosed stress related disorder at a younger age and those with psychiatric comorbidities.”

This once again highlights just how vital reducing our stress and fear loads is for those of us already suffering with chronic stress, chronic illness, or trauma.

To my mind, this also reveals once again the travesty of the fear mongering approach that governments, nudge units, scientists, and media took to the pandemic. While some still excuse the scare tactics because it supposedly drove people to be more compliant with purported medical and non-medical interventions, the above study reveals the lie. It shows that all the stress related issues caused directly by the fear mongering would have been totally counter-productive to the supposed aim of lowering infection rates and boosting immunity. Indeed, according to the article:

“correspondingly, people exposed to psychological stress have been reported to have a higher risk of respiratory virus infections, paralleled with reduced immune responses to several antiviral and antibacterial vaccines.”

The chronic psychological stress caused by the fear mongering would not only have increased risk of infection from covid per se, but to many other infections too. The fact that folks with dementia, who can’t take chronic stress or loneliness at all, were very over-represented in the early excessive deaths, says it all to me, precisely because they are the “canaries in the coalmine” when it comes to the impacts of stress and fear.

Note the Swedish study was published in 2019, so all this was known well before the pandemic.

One place where I see that the study has profound implications is the hospital setting, where there are lots of potentially infectious agents in the environment. In such an environment, keeping vulnerable patients feeling as calm, relaxed, and safe as possible, will be vital for optimizing immune function and fighting off the pathogens. Conversely, the down-regulation of their immune system due to psychological distress will be potentially deadly.

Unfortunately, my own experience, and that of all my family and friends, in recent years, is, uniformly, that hospitals have become the anti-thesis of oasis of healing. Indeed, they have become truly terrifying places of dehumanization and traumatic experience. Given the links between psychological stress and proneness to infectious agents, it is no wonder that there are now so many hospital acquired infections!

Again, this speaks to the profound inappropriateness of the hospital policies that were implemented during the pandemic. In particular, the barring of family members from visiting hospitalized patients. This must have been absolutely horrific, amounting to psychological torture, which, in turn would have significantly increased not only negative outcomes of covid, but also proneness to other lethal infections. Indeed, this point is starkly illustrated by

Tessa Lena

of

Tessa Fights Robots

recent article:

"Most COVID-19 Deaths May Be The Result of a Completely Different Infection"

“so while COVID-19 may have put these patients in the hospital, it was actually an infection brought on by the use of a mechanical ventilator that was more likely to be the cause of death when this infection didn't respond to treatment.”

Finally, I want to return one of the conclusions made in the Swedish study:

“… the association [between stress related disorders and risk of life threatening infections] was more pronounced among people with a diagnosed stress related disorder at a younger age…”

to say, once again, that the psychological distress we seem to be deliberately inflicting on our children and young folk, including inducing climate anxiety, and sexualizing them too early, is terrible and shameful, and is setting them up for very bad outcomes in later life.

News:
My fellow substacker,

Lilian Sjøberg

of

The HOPE shortcut

, and I, have created a new subscription member's area, for those interested in healing and becoming healthier through removing stress and fear, and as a way to financially support our work: