Psychosocial stressors and adjustment disorder: van Gogh's life chart illustrates stress and disease.

The life of Vincent van Gogh is illustrative of the natural history of psychosocial stressors and their relationship to a person's states of health and disease. In the author's opinion, there is a lack of such understanding in the current, established criteria for psychosocial stressors in the diagnosis of adjustment disorder. By use of a life chart, which chronologically documents a person's major life events and concomitant health status over his or her life span, a fuller understanding can be reached regarding why an individual becomes ill at a particular time.