Community Surveys of Mental Disorders: Recent Achievements
Community Surveys of Mental Disorders: Recent Achievements
A quarter of a century ago, Lee N. Robins, one of the pioneers of psychiatric epidemiology, wrote an important review in the Archives of General Psychiatry to discuss the state and future of the discipline. In the last part of the article, she put forward a set of recommendations she felt important for the development of this area of study, listed below (in a different order from that given in the original paper):
It is reasonable to ask to what extent, 25 years later, these recommendations have been fulfilled. As we will try to show, the latest generation of community epidemiological surveys has allowed the accomplishment of the first three recommendations, while the fourth is being achieved thanks to a new, large international effort (discussed later); recommendations 5 and 6 have also seen significant achievements in the last decades, while much more needs to be done with respect to points 7-9. In this Introduction, we briefly review the most recent generation of epidemiological community surveys, which have complied, in part or completely, with Robins' first four recommendations. For reasons of space, this review does not cover other significant advances that have taken place in the last 25 years in other important areas of psychiatric epidemiology, including health services research and analytical and experimental epidemiology. Some excellent examples of the richness and sophistication achieved in psychiatric epidemiological research are well represented by the contributions selected for this section of Current Opinion in Psychiatry.
A quarter of a century ago, Lee N. Robins, one of the pioneers of psychiatric epidemiology, wrote an important review in the Archives of General Psychiatry to discuss the state and future of the discipline. In the last part of the article, she put forward a set of recommendations she felt important for the development of this area of study, listed below (in a different order from that given in the original paper):
the improvement of diagnosis by interview;
the study of the relationship between physical and mental disorders;
the identification of barriers to care;
the conduct of cross-national comparisons;
the research use of clinical records;
the epidemiological study of the course of psychiatric disorders;
the development of instruments for assessing environmental factors;
the conduct of prospective studies of anticipatable life events;
the development of data banks of rare disorders.
It is reasonable to ask to what extent, 25 years later, these recommendations have been fulfilled. As we will try to show, the latest generation of community epidemiological surveys has allowed the accomplishment of the first three recommendations, while the fourth is being achieved thanks to a new, large international effort (discussed later); recommendations 5 and 6 have also seen significant achievements in the last decades, while much more needs to be done with respect to points 7-9. In this Introduction, we briefly review the most recent generation of epidemiological community surveys, which have complied, in part or completely, with Robins' first four recommendations. For reasons of space, this review does not cover other significant advances that have taken place in the last 25 years in other important areas of psychiatric epidemiology, including health services research and analytical and experimental epidemiology. Some excellent examples of the richness and sophistication achieved in psychiatric epidemiological research are well represented by the contributions selected for this section of Current Opinion in Psychiatry.
