Rates Of Common Mental Illness Not Rising, Says New Study, UK

Rates Of Common Mental Illness Not Rising, Says New Study, UK

Rates of hackneyed mental disorder, including depression and uneasiness, have not increased in recent years, according to unused research published in the June edition of the British Journal of Psychiatry.

The study, carried public by researchers from the University of Leicester, UCL (University College London) and King's College London, contradicts anecdotal concerns that the strength of mental disorder is on the ascend.

The researchers used data from three British Adult Psychiatric Morbidity Surveys, carried to the end in 1993, 2000 and 2007, to counsellor changes in the rates of ideal health disorders in England over the 15 year proposition. There were 8,670 survey participants in 1993, 6,977 participants in 2000 and 6,815 participants in 2007.

The researchers plant almost no change in the appraise of common mental disorder across the 15-year phrase for women. It affected 18.1% of women in 1993, 18.5% in 2000 and 18.9% in 2007. However in men, the scold of common mental health disorder was little higher in 2000 (12.6%) than in 1993 (10.9%) or 2007 (11.8%).

The researchers did ascertain to be the same an increase in sleep problems mixed women over the 15-year term. In 1993, sleep problems affected 28.4% of women, boil to 34.7% in 2000 and 36.7% in 2007. But there was no clear increase for other symptoms in the same state as irritability, worry or fatigue amid women or men.

The study participants were divided into 9 beginning cohorts, which also allowed the researchers to analyse premises for each cohort as they stricken in years across the 15-year period. The researchers set up that men in the cohort born in 1950-6 had higher rates of worn out mental disorder than men born in the preceding cohort of 1943-9, by surrounding a third. But after this, the rates of trite mental disorder in subsequent cohorts remained perpetual. The researchers believe this may subsist due to changes in society and persons's lifestyles at that time.

Professor Terry Brugha, Professor of Psychiatry at the University of Leicester, related: "We found that men born in 1950-1956 were the primitive birth cohort to experience higher rates of riotousness. These men were towards the beginning of the baby-boom generation and were teenagers for the time of the 1960s. They were among the at the outset to experience teenage culture, both home grown and imported from the USA, including greater exposure to harmful substances. This may gain made their transition to adulthood separate to that of previous generations."

The researchers raise more mixed trends among women. Again, those born in 1950-1956 had a slenderly higher prevalence of common neurotic riot, sleep problems and worry than those born in the 1943-1949 tenth of a legion. However, the difference between the couple age groups was less pronounced than amidst the men.

Professor Brugha concluded: "Overall, we cast little evidence that the prevalence of low mental disorder, which includes depression and care disorders, is increasing in England. Our discovery of stable rates contradicts popular media stories of a relentlessly insurrection tide of mental illness."

References:

Spiers N, Bebbington P, McManus S, Brugha TS, Jenkins R and Meltzer H. Age and ancestry cohort differences in the prevalence of worn out mental disorder in England: the National Psychiatric Morbidity Surveys, 1993-2007. British Journal of Psychiatry 2011; 198: 479-484