Comorbidity in psychiatric and chronic physical disease: autocognitive developmental disorders of structured psychosocial stress.

Applying a 'necessary condition' communication theory formalism roughly similar to that of Dretske, but focused entirely on the statistical properties of long sequences of signals emitted by the interacting cognitive modules of human biology, we explore the regularities apparent in comorbid psychiatric and chronic physical disorders using an extension of recent perspectives on autoimmune disease. We find that structured psychosocial stress can literally write a distorted image of itself onto child development, resulting in a life course trajectory to characteristic forms of comorbid mind/body dysfunction affecting both dominant and subordinate populations within a pathogenic social hierarchy.