Life Events, Psychiatric Disturbance and Physical Illness

Abstract

The relationship between life events and the onset of organic physical illness was studied in a group of women in the general population. The link between severe events and the onset of organic illness, which held only for women of 50 yr or younger, was not a direct causal association but mediated by an intervening psychiatric disturbance of an affective kind, all occurring within a 6 mo. period. The high psychiatric morbidity found in physically ill patients was discussed.