The US National Comorbidity Survey: overview and future directions.

This report presents an overview of the results of the US National Comorbidity Survey (NCS) (Kessler et al., 1994) and future directions based on these results. The NCS is a survey that was mandated by the US Congress to study the comorbidity of substance use disorders and nonsubstance psychiatric disorders in the general population of the US. It is the first survey to administer a structured psychiatric interview for DSM-IH-R disorders to a representative national sample in the US. The need for such a survey was noted nearly two decades ago in the report of the President's Commission on Mental Health and Illness (1978). It was impossible to undertake such a survey at that time, though, due to the absence of a structured research diagnostic interview capa-) ble of generating reliable psychiatric diagnoses in general population samples. Recognizing this need, the National Institute of Mental Health funded the development of the Diagnostic Interview Schedule (DIS) (Robins et al., 1981), a research diagnostic interview that can be administered by trained interviewers who are not clinicians. The DIS was first used in the Epidemiologic Catchment Area (ECA) Study, a landmark study that interviewed over 20,000 respondents in a series of five community epidemiologic surveys of the US. The ECA has been the main sour-