Psychiatric epidemiology in Canada and the CCHS study.

T he field of psychiatric epidemiology has a long, albeit often neglected, history—one that antedates the beginning of psychoanalysis. Klerman (1) and Weissman (2) have outlined 5 “generations” of epidemiologic research. The first dates back to 1885, when Jarvis (3) used hospital records and key informants in a Massachusetts town to determine the prevalence of treated and untreated mental disorders. The post–World War II era, which Weissman and Klerman both referred to as the golden age of psychiatric epidemiology, saw the famous Midtown Manhattan Study (4) in the US and the Stirling County Study in Canada (5). These studies and others were marked by large representative samples, high response rates, and the use of measures of overall impairment rather than the unreliable psychiatric diagnoses of the day.