Tags : depression, mental health
Study: Common Mental Disorders More Prevalent Than Previously Thought
Durham, NC (AHN) – A recent study on the prevalence of anxiety, depression and substance dependency may be twice as high as the mental health community has been led to believe.
Duke University psychologists Terrie Moffitt and Avshalom Caspi and colleagues from the United Kingdom and New Zealand conducted a longitudinal study of more than 1,000 New Zealanders from birth to age 32 to reach the conclusion that people vastly under report the amount of mental illness they’ve suffered when asked to recall their history years after the fact.
However it is this method of self-reporting from memory which has given researchers much of the basis of what we know about the prevalence of anxiety, depression, alcohol dependence and marijuana dependence.
“If you start with a group of children and follow them their whole lives, sooner or later almost everybody will experience one of these disorders,” said Moffitt, the Knut Schmitt-Nielsen professor of psychology and neuroscience at Duke.
The Great Smoky Mountains Study, a similar effort based at Duke, has tracked 1,400 American children from age 9-13 into their late 20s and found similar patterns, said Jane Costello, a professor medical psychology at Duke who runs the study.
“I think we’ve got to get used to the idea that mental illness is actually very common,” Costello said. “People are growing up impaired, untreated and not functioning to their full capacity because we’ve ignored it.”
The prevalence of mental illness has been hotly debated by policy makers and mental health providers for many years with both the pharmaceutical and health insurance industries also have a stake in the debate.
Guidelines published by the American Psychiatric Association that set the bar for defining what is and isn’t a treatable illness are currently being revised by a rewriting of the authoritative Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM). But given the findings of these longitudinal studies, the stringency of the diagnostic criteria might need to be reconsidered, said Moffitt, who is on the committee writing the new DSM-Vstandards.
“Researchers might begin to ask why so many people experience a disorder at least once during their lifetimes and what this means for the way we define mental health, deliver services and count the economic burdens of mental illness,” Moffitt said.
Critics say it could be argued that the diagnostic standards have been set too low if so many people can be considered mentally ill. On the other hand, perhaps these findings argue for more and better mental health care because the disorders are more common than anyone had realized.
At the very least, researchers who’ve reviewed the data agree that the findings can help reduce the stigma against mental illness and mental health care.
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