Life events, psychiatric disturbance and physical illness.

The relationship between life events and the onset of organic physical illness has been 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 years or younger, was not a direct causal association but mediated by an intervening psychiatric disturbance of an affective kind, all occurring within a six month period. The findings are discussed in the light of the high psychiatric morbidity found in physically ill patients.