This research is a comprehensive centralized secondary analysis of risk factors in the World Health Organization (WHO) World Mental Health (WMH) surveys. The WMH surveys are a coordinated set of community psychiatric epidemiological surveys carried out under the auspices of WHO in 28 countries. The WMH dataset is unprecedented in psychiatric epidemiology for its size (over 214,000 respondents), the range of disorders assessed, and the range of information collected on risk factors.
The researchers are working on three lines of investigation:
Sex differences in mental illness. It is well known that women have higher rates of anxiety and mood disorders than men, while men have higher rates of substance and impulse-control disorders than women. A number of hypotheses have been proposed to explain these patterns. The WMH surveys allow these to be studied across a much wider range of societies than ever before and to determine if they vary in ways related to the positions of women in the countries under study. In addition, the WMH surveys contain valuable data to evaluate hypotheses not examined in previous studies on a broader range of disorders, female reproductive health, detailed role histories, and archival data gathered from the United Nations, World Bank, and WHO on cross-national differences in the position of women in society. These data will be used to study patterns and correlates of cross-national differences in sex differences in mental illness.
The association between social class and mental illness. It is well known that social class is inversely related to most types of mental illness. A number of hypotheses have been advanced to explain this. The WMH surveys contain a much broader range of social class indicators than previous surveys. In addition to conventional measures of education, occupation, and income, the WMH data include information on ownership of the means of production, purchase power parity, assets, disaggregated components of family income, subjective social class position, and family-of-origin social class (to study intergenerational mobility).
The long-term effects of childhood adversity on adult mental illness. It is well known that adults who suffer from current mental disorders are significantly more likely than others to report exposure to childhood adversities. Most studies that have investigated this topic are retrospective, as prospective studies have major drawbacks. Thus, the most accurate general population data on the prevalence and adult correlates of childhood adversities are generally thought to come from studies of adults who retrospectively report about their exposure to childhood adversities. The usefulness of retrospective studies has been compromised, however, by the fact that they typically focus on only a single adversity; focus on a single outcome mental disorder; do not distinguish effects on onset and course; and do not investigate whether effects decrease with age. All of these problems can be addressed in the WMH data. In addition, the large size of the WMH surveys allows effects of individual adversities and adversity clusters to be distinguished with much greater precision than in previous investigations.
