Recent development of psychiatric epidemiology in China

✍ Scribed by Keh-Ming Lin; Arthur Kleinman

• Publisher: Springer US
• Year: 1981
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 474 KB
• Volume: 5
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0165-005X
• DOI: 10.1007/bf00055417

✦ Synopsis

The authors review recently published psychiatric epidemiologieal data from the People's Republic of China, and compare these findings with data from Taiwan and worldwide.

In a recent issue of the Chinese Journal of Neurology and Psychiatry, a total of six papers on psychiatric epidemiology were published. 1 Containing basic and important data on the prevalence rates of major psychiatric disorders which have not been previously available, these reports contribute significantly to our understanding of mental illness among the more than 900 million Chinese living in a socio-political and economic milieu distinctively different from other parts of the world. These epidemiologies all involved mass survey, remarkably similar methodologies, and, with one exception, were all conducted within the last ten years.

Since these reports were written in Chinese and published in a journal which is still not readily available to psychiatrists in the West, we decided to review in this paper some of the more prominent findings and evaluate their significance within the context of what we know about psychiatry and psychiatric epidemiology among Chinese generally.