Comparative Epidemiology of the Mental Disorders

There is now an epidemic of investigations of the epidemiology of psychiatric disorders. That this epidemic is assuming world-wide proportions is evidenced by the number of European and North American countries represented in this collected proceedings of the forty-ninth annual meeting of the American Psychopathological Association held in New York in February, 1959. That it is a desirable epidemic is substantiated by the high caliber of the papers which are presented and by the comprehensive coverage of mental health research in terms of the definition of epidemiology of the 1952 Colorado Springs Meeting of North American epidemiologists: "The study of all factors and their interrelationships which affect the occurrence and course of health and disease in a population." The internist may not wish to read all these papers in detail, but he may enjoy some sampling of international psychiatry and of some of the broad-scale approaches to psychiatric research in