Incidence of neurosis in a new housing estate.

A housing estate built by the London County Council in Hertfordshire has provided the setting for a series of socio-medical investigations carried out by members of the Department of Public Health, London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. Reports so far published include an analysis of general practitioner consultations (Brotherston and Chave, 1956), and a brief discussion of some social and psychological effects of rehousing (Maule and Martin, 1956). This paper presents an estimate of the incidence of mental illness among the population of the estate. In view of the estate's demographic structure one would be led to expect a relatively low rate of mental illness, since those groups with the highest risk of admission to mental hospitalsold people, unmarried adults, unskilled workers form a small part of the estate population (Brotherston and Chave, 1956). On the other hand, it seemed plausible that the strains consequent on rehousing in a new estate of suburban character, combined with the preponderance of small families unsupported by extended kinship ties, might predispose to an increased incidence of at any rate the minor psycho-neurotic and psycho-somatic disorders. We were also aware of the fact that, in an appreciable proportion of rehoused families, some degree of priority for rehousing had been allowed because of illness in one or another member of the family, with neurotic illness ranking fairly highamong the conditions concerned, and we were interested to know how far this might have increased the need for psychiatric or quasi-psychiatric care. We were not in a position to undertake a direct screening of a representative sample of the estate population, and in the circumstances decided to obtain a number of simpler and necessarily more superficial indices of the incidence of mental illness. Three of these relate to the use of medical services and the fourth is based