Welcome to the 21st WCP Virtual Congress Program Scheduling

The coexistence of mental and physical disorders- multimorbidity, is a growing global challenge, driven by rapidly changing demographics and lifestyles across the world. Multimorbidity worsens outcomes for both mental and physical health conditions, increasing mortality, morbidity and poverty, and reducing quality of life for people living with multiple conditions. In this symposium, we present four studies relevant to this theme, which between them(i) document the rates of comorbid physical conditions, the adverse physical health outcomes and poorer access to healthcare for people with severe mental illness, (ii) describe pharmacological interventions for tackling increased metabolic risks associated with antipsychotics in this population, and (iii) review approaches to study multimorbidity. 1.Kessing, L. (Denmark) will present rates of physical diseases among patients and siblings with bipolar disorder, from a Danish nation-wide population-based longitudinal register linkage study. 2.Siddiqi N. (UK)(Chair)will present findings on the impact of having a severe mental illness on diabetes outcomes, including cardiovascular mortality, and healthcare use, using routinely collected data from primary care. 3.Siskind D. (Australia) will describe the use of metformin and GLP-1RAs to prevent diabetes among people on antipsychotics. 4.Cawthorpe D. (Canada) will review the typical approaches employed to-date in the study of mental and physical multimorbidity and propose standardized analytic models that have been applied successfully to complex multimorbidity. The symposium brings together studies from three continents and showcases a range of methods to study and address mental-physical multimorbidity, which will help to address the unacceptable gap in health and life expectancy for people with mental illness.