INTEGRATE THE FOLLOWING [FROM PSYCHOLOGICAL EXPERIENCE SUB-SECTION):
Epidemiological studies have also shown that common mental disorders [zf1] and physical disease are strongly inter-connected, highly co-morbid and share critical pathways to ill health and disease (O’Neil et al. 2015; Druss, Walker, 2011[zf2] ). For example, in a study of 245,404 participants from 60 countries across the world, an average of between 9.3-23% of participants with one or more chronic physical condition had co-morbid depression (Moussavi et al., 2007).  This is significantly higher than depression rates in people without a chronic physical disease (p>0.0001). Moreover, even after adjustment for health conditions and socioeconomic factors, depression had the largest effect on worsening mean health scores. The authors conclude that participants with one or more chronic condition and co-morbid depression had the poorest health of all of the disease states.