CONTINUING PROFESSIONAL EDUCATION

A glossary on psychiatric epidemiology

Huibert Burger, Jan Neeleman

Julius Center for Health Sciences and Primary Care, University Medical Center Utrecht, Utrecht, The Netherlands

Correspondence to:
Correspondence to:
Dr H Burger
Senior Lecturer in Psychiatric Epidemiology, Julius Center for Health Sciences and Primary Care, University Medical Center Utrecht, PO Box 85500, 3508 GA, Utrecht, The Netherlands; h.burger@umcutrecht.nl

Accepted 18 April 2005

Abbreviations: CIDI, composite international diagnostic interview; DSM, diagnostic and statistical manual

The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below.

Psychiatric epidemiology constitutes an important subdiscipline of scientific psychiatry. Nevertheless, it still lags behind other branches of epidemiology. This has been attributed to the difficulties encountered in conceptualising and measuring mental disorders.¹ It is only recently that the emphasis in the field has shifted from descriptive to analytical research and this is probably because of the influences from genetic epidemiology and social sciences.² Psychiatric epidemiology has taken most of its tools from general epidemiology—that is, chronic disease epidemiology.³ It is therefore not surprising that no fundamental differences between the mother discipline and her psychiatric descendant exist. Yet, there are particular challenges in the conduct of psychiatric epidemiological research that are absent or less prominent in general, mostly somatically oriented, epidemiology.⁴ Challenges particularly encountered in psychiatric epidemiology include

1. Assessment of caseness: psychiatric diagnoses are mostly made on the basis of symptoms—patients’ reports of their subjective experiences—and not signs, like fever in . . . [Full text of this article]

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