This chapter discusses the several parallel themes which have occurred within the subdomains of stress, social support, personality and coping. The stress and the social support domains are the proper conceptualisation and measurement of the concepts. Cobb defined social support as information that one belongs to a socially coherent community and that one is loved and esteemed. One early measure of life stress included in its domain questions about changes in sleeping and eating habits; however, changes in these functions often occur in depressive disorders and hence are enquired about in measures of psychological distress. Self-esteem has also recently received some attention as a personality trait that might play an important mediating role in the stress-distress relationship. The more physiological roots of stress theory would seem to lead to various possibilities regarding biological mechanisms of effect, but these would seem to have more relevance for physical than for psychological disorder.