Minor psychiatric morbidity and general practice consultations: the West London Survey

Data from a large-scale (N greater than 3000) community survey (the 'West London Survey') were used to examine the effect of minor psychiatric morbidity on the probability of contact with primary medical care, and factors which influenced this effect. The presence of such morbidity was found to double the probability of consulting, and about one-fifth of consultations could be attributed to it. Logistic analysis was used to investigate the joint effect on general practice consultation of minor psychiatric morbidity, three other health-related variables and five sociodemographic variables. It was found, as expected, that the health variables exerted much more influence on consulting than the sociodemographic variables, but that the relationship was characterized by complex interactions between health and sociodemographic variables. In particular, sex, socioeconomic status and minor psychiatric morbidity interacted in their effect on the probability of general practitioner consultation. The findings are interpreted in the context of previous theoretical and empirical work.