Symptoms, Illness Behavior, and Help-Seeking

events and negative health outcomes) which may be brought about by the presence, absence, or intensity of such intervening variables as social networks, expectancy related to aging, availability of material resources, coping abilities, and many other intervening variables. Moreover, statistical confounding is often a problem. Because of the plethora of models and of the ways of operationalizing them, complex statistical issues are discussed at length. As Richard Day concludes, in the final chapter of this book, there are really no treatment modalities to test yet. And given the complex relationships which obtain between stressful life events and negative health outcomes, there are even few recommendations which can be made to state and federal governments at this early stage in the investigative process. This is especially true for the relationships with psychopathologies (which themselves often lack proven diagnostic reliability and validity). But while it will always be impossible to prescribe that patients refrain from stressful life events, it may, with a better understanding of their effects, be possible to create social, biological, and environmental supports in the future to minimize the effects of inescapable life stress. Thus, while I do not feel that this is a suitable book for the neophyte reader in the subject, or that it succeeds in making recommendations other than the ubiquitous exhortation that further research be done, I feel that it succeeds in marshalling the existing evidence, in explaining the methodologies and the problems inherent in assuring their reliable and valid measurement, in pointing out directions for future research, and in providing a forum for a discussion by some of the foremost investigators in the field.