The Hazards of Change

Any great change--even a pleasant change--produces stress in man. That is the implication, at least, of a study recently reported to the American Association for the Advancement of Science by Dr. Thomas Holmes, professor of psychiatry at the University of Washington in Seattle. Furthermore, Holmes found that too many changes, coming too close together, often produce grave illness or abysmal depression.

In the course of his investigation, Holmes devised a scale assigning point values to changes that often affect human beings (see box). When enough of these occur within one year and add up to more than 300, trouble may lie ahead. In Holmes' survey, 80% of people who exceeded 300 became pathologically depressed, had heart attacks, or developed other serious ailments. Of scorers in the 150-300 range, 53% were similarly affected, as were 33% of those scoring up to 150.

A hypothetical example: John was married (50); as he had hoped, his wife became pregnant (40), stopped working (26), and bore a son (39). John, who hated his work as a soap-company chemist, found a better-paying job (38) as a teacher (36) in a college outside the city. After a vacation (13) to celebrate, he moved his family to the country (20), returned to the hunting and fishing (19) he had loved as a child, and began seeing a lot of his congenial new colleagues (18). Everything was so much better that he was even able to give up smoking (24). On the Holmes scale, these events total an ominous 323.

To arrive at his scoring system, Dr. Holmes assigned an arbitrary value of 50 to the act of getting married and then asked people in several countries to rank other changes in relation to marriage. For example, a person who thought that pregnancy represented a greater change than marriage was to assign to pregnancy a number higher than 50. To correlate change and health, Holmes kept a watch on 80 Seattle residents for two years and then compared their personal-change histories with their physical and mental ailments.

Built-in Danger. To be sure, a method of predicting such ailments may well have a built-in danger: a self-rater using the scale could become depressed at-the very prospect of depression. But Holmes is confident. Physical and emotional illness can be prevented, he says, by counseling susceptible people not to make too many life changes in too short a time.

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