Abstract

We conducted stress psychotherapy using an expert system via computer networks, telephones and facsimiles in Gifu City, Japan. Through the therapy, we have obtained some distinct knowledge about the source of stress, stress related disorders and illness.This paper reports some of the results categorized as follows; adolescents, housewives, career women, geriatric persons, researchers, salarymen and managers. For example, the stresses of career women are due to sexual harassment in their working time and serving tea and coffee to clients. About half of them have felt a lack of personal satisfactions with friends, spouses, children and in-laws. They also expressed problems in time-management between family and office work and difficulty in accomplishing tasks impart due to distractions. When they feel lack of self esteem due to self-demand and self-blaming, they have a problem in expressing their own feelings and thus keep their problems and pressures to themselves. Emotional symptoms manifested by stress are developed personal sensitivity, and pre-menstrual tension. The career women pre-menstrual tensions are four times higher then for housewives. Psychological disorders caused by stress are hostility, anxiety and depression. Physiological disorders include tension headaches, migraine headaches and insomnia. A few of the career women experienced sacroiliac pain and duodenal ulcers. We believe that our expert system for the stress management is convenient and user friendly for stress diagnosis and to seek treatment to find ways to alleviate stress