Psychiatric Epidemiology (Paperback)

High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! Psychiatric epidemiology is a field which seeks to measure the prevalence of mental illness in society. It is a subfield of the more general epidemiology. It is very difficult to accurately measure such a thing as mental illness prevalence, and current techniques are relatively poor. Two areas of concern, sometimes called the crisis of psychiatric epidemiology today, are the high estimates of mental illness that many studies produce and the difference in results between studies. The common technique for psychiatric epidemiological research today is structured interviewing, a technique in which a series of questions is administered by lay interviewers to determine whether an individual is disordered or nondisordered. Clinical prevalence is a measure of how many people who seek out mental health services are actually diagnosed with a mental illness, whereas actual prevalence is the number of people in all of society who have a mental illness.