The recently published volume Stress in Post-War Britain (edited by Mark Jackson) is now available for free download. The volume is described as follows:

Adopting a wide range of sources, methods and perspectives, contributors to this volume collectively challenge simplistic narratives of stress and distress in post-war Britain. Tracing the language, concepts and experiences of stress through the post-war decades, the chapters explore the manner in which work and home, as well as war and peace, dictated patterns of mental and physical health. They reveal how employers and doctors, as well as employees and patients, measured and disputed the relative impact of external circumstances and individual temperament on the capacity to adapt to social and cultural change, how normative accounts of masculine strength and feminine frailty determined how men and women were seen to cope with stress, and how scientific investigations of mind and body were integrated into a complex model of disease that has continued to prescribe approaches to health and happiness well into the twenty-first century.

Contents

Stress in Post-War Britain: An Introduction – Mark Jackson

Part I: Stress at Home and Work  

From War to Peace: Families Adapting to Change – Pamela Richardson

Families, Stress and Mental Illness in Devon, 1940s to 1970s – Nicole Baur

Gender, Stress and Alcohol Abuse in Post-War Britain – Ali Haggett

Working Too Hard: Experiences of Worry and Stress in Post-War Britain – Jill Kirby

Industrial Automation and Stress, c.1945–79 – Sarah Hayes

Cultural Change, Stress and Civil Servants’ Occupational Health, c.1967–85 – Debbie Palmer 95

Part II: Models of Stress

Men and Women under Stress: Neuropsychiatric Models of Resilience during and after the Second World War – Mark Jackson

Stomach for the Peace: Psychosomatic Disorders in UK Veterans and Civilians, 1945–55 – Edgar Jones

Food Allergy, Mental Illness and Stress since 1945 – Matthew Smith

Labouring Stress: Scientific Research, Trade Unions and Perceptions of Workplace Stress in Mid-Twentieth-Century Britain – Joseph Melling

Creating ‘The Social’: Stress, Domesticity and Attempted Suicide Notes Index – Chris Millard