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The application of the epidemiological method in psychiatry
Author(s) -
Shepherd M.
Publication year - 1982
Publication title -
acta psychiatrica scandinavica
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 2.849
H-Index - 146
eISSN - 1600-0447
pISSN - 0001-690X
DOI - 10.1111/j.1600-0447.1982.tb00888.x
Subject(s) - epidemiology , psychopathology , german , psychiatry , social psychiatry , epidemiological method , population , psychology , psychiatric epidemiology , biostatistics , mental health , medicine , environmental health , history , pathology , archaeology
The assumptions underlying the epidemiological approach to psychiatry were clearly summarized in the report of a World Health Organization Expert Committee (WHO (1960)). It had, says the report, become increasingly apparent that “…the problems of studying personal susceptibility and the modifying effects of the environment or habit on the risks of attack were essentially similar in the communicable diseases and in other kinds of human illness. Consequently, the methods which had been used so successfully in uncovering the origin and mode of spread of diseases associated with microbial infection came to be increasingly applied to the study of mental disorders and the use of the term‘epidemiology’to imply the study of their distribution and behaviour in differing conditions of life in human communities became widely accepted”. The application of epidemiological concepts to the field of psychiatry can thus be viewed as part of a more general change in medical attitudes towards the problems of chronic non‐infectious disease. The principal advantage to be derived from this outlook is a unification of research strategies, a drawing together of such previously varied topics as the analysis of institutional statistics, the use of psychometric tests in the screening of child populations, the demographic and sociological studies of suicide from the time of Durkheim onwards, the area population surveys of the German and Scandinavian geneticists, the ecological research of the Chicago school, and the many descriptive accounts of collective psychopathology.