[The importance of social stress and effective occupational motivation in the forming of life-style, population health, and the development of demographic processes in Russia].

The body of pathogenetic mechanisms that have caused super high and super early mortality of able-bodied people due to socioeconomic reforms is caused by a special form of stress, the so called "social stress", having a specific origin. The reason for it is loss of effective occupational motivation by population, a motivation based on the ability to provide decent existence for oneself and one's family with honest labor. Within the 20th century there were only four periods when population health improved, and all these periods were associated with a rise in occupational motivation. Chronic social stress, unlike common stress, does not mobilize the protective force of the organism. It causes the biggest health loss in able-bodied population, leading to the development of the exhaustion phase of general adaptation syndrome, breakdown of the dynamic stereotype of higher nervous activity, the forming of the phenomenon of "programmed death of the organism--phenoptosis", and disorder of free-radical balance of the organism in heterozygous individuals who have grown poor. Analysis of the causes and mechanisms of the development of medico-demographic crisis suggests that the nation's viability has lowered not because of the reforms themselves, but due to the strategy of their conduction.