Chronic pain patients are three times more likely to develop depression than those without pain. The relationship works both ways: pain and depression worsen each other, and increasing pain severity raises depression risk proportionally.
Three times more likely.
Increasing pain severity proportionally elevates the risk of depression.
So disorders like depression, they are more common in people experiencing chronic pain. There's such a big overlap here, and this is shocking to me. Patients with chronic pain are three times more likely to develop depression compared to those without pain. And the increase in pain severity elevates that risk of depression proportionally. So this is a really, really big deal. You could say. I don't think it'd be a stretch to say depression and chronic pain are intimately connected. And it's going to be very rare that you find somebody with severe chronic pain that doesn't have depress. As a matter of fact, again, the more chronic the pain, the more severe the pain, the more likely they are to have depressive symptomatology as well. And this reciprocal relationship between depression and chronic pain, they can engage and worsen each other as the process plays out.
