In the years prior to publication, primary health care had been gaining in significance as a setting for research on mental illness in the general population and for the development of new preventive approaches in this field. The growing need for research had received impetus from the escalating costs of hospital-based health care, the re-structuring of health services in a number of countries, with an increased emphasis on community care and prevention, and the World Health Organization’s ‘Health for All’ campaign.
Key Features
- Selected contributions from the first international scientific meeting on mental illness held in Toronto in 1989.
- Five sections covering the growth of a new research field, psychiatric surveys, medical care issues, and late-life mental disorders.
- Reports from countries including the USA, UK, Netherlands, Germany, Spain, Italy, Finland, Canada, and Australia.
- Focus on general practice as a field laboratory for studying psychiatric illness in unselected populations.
- Data presented from largely unpublished projects by the authors.
Additional Information
These developments had already stimulated a new interest in the scope for epidemiological and evaluative investigations based on general medical practice. With the exception of the first two chapters, which sketch the background of public-health and general-practice epidemiology, all contributions are focused on the occurrence, distribution, diagnostic composition, and risk factors of psychiatric illness.
Specifications
This book was originally published in 1992.
