Last month, Selena Gomez became the latest celebrity to publicly acknowledge her experience with mental illness, announcing a career break to deal with her anxiety, panic attacks and depression. Gomez has been suffering from lupus since 2013, and her case is a timely and high-profile reminder that we should not neglect the link between physical and mental illness, especially when the latter comes in the form of chronic illness.

In a statement, Gomez expressed her hope that “other [sufferers] will be encouraged to address their own issues”. The good news for UK sufferers of mental illness is that it is better accepted today than ever before. In a 2014 Attitudes to Mental Illness survey, 91 per cent of respondents agreed that “we need to adopt a far more tolerant attitude toward people with mental health problems in our society”. It’s a testament to the success of recent years’ initiatives to destigmatise mental health issues.

Yet one of the unfortunate side effects of singling out mental health for greater recognition, acceptance and funding is that it has added credence to the often subconscious perception of mental and physical health as entirely distinct from one another.

The very title of the cited survey is symptomatic of wider issues that society needs to address. We research attitudes to mental illness as standalone, under the (usually correct) assumption that people react to it differently than physical illness. We talk about illnesses ‘of the body or brain’, and when we discuss NHS cuts we measure the physical and mental health budgets separately. So the promotion of mental health is frequently overlooked in the treatment of a physical condition, and vice versa.

But mental illness is physical, and, while sufferers of mental illness are statistically more likely to also suffer from a ‘physical’ health problem, chronic physical illness has been linked to a higher susceptibility to mental illness.

To return to Selena Gomez, sufferers of lupus have been found to be disproportionately susceptible to anxiety and depression, which are believed to stem both from the stress associated with managing the condition and from increased levels of fatigue and pain which are among its physical symptoms. Elsewhere, while mental health charity Mind estimates that depression affects 2.6 per cent of the UK population, studies suggest the figure is twice as high for asthmatics, and rises to 40 per cent among survivors of strokes.

We need to remember that, for all the support available, Cambridge is a pretty tough place for anyone suffering from a chronic health condition. The system is notoriously inflexible and, where supervisors insist on their students catching up on essays, it’s easy to see taking time off for illness as storing up pressure rather than releasing it.

More generally, our attitudes to our physical health don’t help either. Being tired and feeling physically run down is not only anticipated, but even romanticised in a community where it’s taken as proof of personal adherence to the ‘work hard, play hard’ (or even just ‘work hard’) mantra that the glossy undergraduate prospectus promotes.

Meanwhile, there’s a startling lack of recognition at the University Counselling Service that, while few mental illnesses can be impacted with just a short-term course of counselling sessions, mental illnesses stemming from long-term physical conditions pose particular obstacles to this approach.

This is not to say we should stop sharing with people how we are feeling, either mentally or physically. But we should think twice before accepting a normalisation of physical ill-health, because in doing so we marginalise the experiences of people suffering from chronic conditions, and ignore the implications that such physical illness – be it short-term or chronic – can have on our mental well-being.

“Look after your body, and your mind will look after itself,” a friend once told me. It’s not as simple as that. But perhaps the next step in tackling the stigma still associated with some mental illnesses is to view them more on the same plain as the physical – and accept that often the relationship is not only equal, but causal.