Psychiatric Illness in General Practice.

Over the years there has been an increasing interest in the incidence of psychiatric illness in the broadest terms, both in the general population and more particularly among individuals who already are patients, for various reasons. This book reports an investigation carried out in London utilizing well-selected practices of physicians which permitted demographic and epidemiological data to be gathered. The research design, as finally formulated, was an excellent one which permitted gathering of data with a minimum of bias, and provided material on the epidemiology of psychiatric illness, its prevalence and distribution, psychiatric diagnosis, morbidity rates, and the relationship of psychiatric to general morbidity. One of the conclusions reached is, "It is clear that psychiatric illness represents an important part of the burden of chronic ill health in the community and that it is a serious cause of economic disability, quite apart from the