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This volume reports the formal papers and the discussions thereof at a round-table conference held by the Milbank Fund in 1949. There were forty participants, drawn not only from the field of psychiatry but of statistics, preventive medicine and public health, sociology and anthropology. The purposes of the conference were to review recent studies on the epidemiology of mental disorder, prepare suitable plans for further study, and to deepen the interest of public health workers in the epidemiological approach to problems of mental health and disease.
Erich Lindemann and associates presented a review of available material on patterns of occurrence of 'minor' mental disorders; Ernest Gruenberg did likewise for the 'major' ones. This material was then evaluated by John H. Dingle and Thomas Francis, Jr. The discussion of plans for study was then carried on by Robert Knight, Alexander Leighton, and Gruenberg, while Gordon, Lindemann, Ipsen, and Vaughan detailed a plan for the epidemiologic study of suicide.
One point of the many suggestive and stimulating ones brought out is the need for accurate diagnosis and the need of separating the various entities from what Gordon terms 'an artificial grouping of many morbid processes'. Certainly the student of statistics will utter a hearty 'Amen'!
It is refreshing to find a revival of interest in the epidemiology of mental disorder. The reviewer looked in vain, however, for a reference to the father of psychiatric epidemiology—Esquirol. In 1824 that eminent successor of Pinel presented before the Royal Academy of Medicine a memoir on the question 'Are there nowadays more mentally ill than there were forty years ago?'—a question which we find being asked today and answered much as Esquirol answered it a century and a quarter ago. He referred to the 'frightening augmentation' of mental disorder which was said to 'menace France as a current calamity', and added, 'This fear is not new'. He was not alarmed, looking as he did up