“Co-morbidity” is the term used in professional psychology and medicine to describe the occurrence of two or more disorders at the same time. For example, there is often a high rate of co-morbidity between alcohol dependence and depression. Interestingly, researchers from the United Kingdom have examined the co-morbidity between generalized anxiety disorder (GAD) and generalized social phobia (GSP), and results give some indication of how this happens and how related the disorders actually are.
Generalized Social Phobia
GSP is essentially a term used to describe social phobia that occurs across a wide variety of situations. Like GAD, GSP is found to develop within families, meaning that there may be some sort of inherited genetic predisposition for it, that it is learned behavior and a style of being passed down from parents, or more likely, that it is a combination of these. Since there is a lot of similarity between the theoretical origins of both disorders, and since both involve the experience of clinically significant anxiety, understanding the relationship between them is important, particularly for understanding how to treat them.
Co-Morbidity
There are several models for understanding how these disorders are related, that can also be applied to any other co-morbid disorders. To put it simply, scientists look to see if one disorder causes the other, whether having both is actually a third unnamed disorder, whether the range of symptoms is actually just a magnified version of one or the other, or whether the disorders develop independently of one another. Unfortunately, this is not an easy task to complete.
The Coelho, Cooper, & Murray Study
The Coelho, Cooper, & Murray study looked at the complex ways in which both GAD and GSP can emerge within family systems, and made some interesting conclusions. Namely, that after exploring a large number of families with one or both disorders present, it can be concluded that the disorders are likely transmitted independently. According to this study, this means that one disorder does not cause the other, that they do no represent a third disorder, and that the combination is not a magnified version of either.
For people with GAD as well as another diagnosed disorder, trying to understand how both co-occur can be a mind-numbing challenge. Sometimes the exploration of how this develops, and being able to tell your own story about their origins can be a helpful therapeutic exercise. Furthermore, as research on GAD continues to advance, we will hopefully see more co-morbidity studies, giving us a deeper explanation of this process, ideally to help treat people with more than one disorder.
Source: Coelho, Cooper, & Murray (2007). A family study of co-morbidity between generalized social phobia and generalized anxiety disorder in a non-clinical sample. Journal of Affective Disorders, 100, 103-113.
