Detection and Assessment of Emotional Disorders in a Primary-Care Setting

patients whose emotional disorders are recognized by their doctors what Kessel (1960) has termed TTconspicuous psychiatric morbidity there are also many whose mental illness passes unrecognized by their physicians. Goldberg & Blackwell (1970) have termed such disorders the hidden psychiatric morbidity of general medical practice and have pointed out that such patients tend to present to their physicians with somatic symptoms, for which they typically receive symptomatic treatment. It has recently been shown (Marks, Goldberg, & Hillier (1979) that a large group of family physicians in Manchester, England, detects about 54% of the mental illnesses present among their patients, but that such practitioners differ greatly in their ability to detect these disorders: some detect almost all of them, but others detect very few. The ability to make accurate assessments of mental disorders has been demonstrated