Co-Morbidity

Suffering from two or more illnesses at one time. Makes it very difficult to figure out the cause(s).

Very commonly observed in psychology, because of its highly complex nature.

In psychology, a psychiatrist would use the term “co-morbid” to describe the symptoms of someone who’s suffering from both OCD and depression. Psychiatric theory believes that obsessive compulsions are a completely separate problem from depression and need to be treated differently.

Co-morbitidy is one of the main concepts that highlights the difference between the various approaches to psychology.

a strange and interesting concept. It is used mostly in psychiatry as a jargonified way of saying “we don’t know what’s going on.”

In theoretical terms, the existence of psychological co-morbidity implies that there is something broken in the psychiatric model of mental and emotional health. If anxiety and depression really were separate “diseases” with independent causes, then why do so many depressed people have anxiety symptoms, and vice-versa? Why does one schizophrenia sufferer have crippling paranoia and another