Synopses & Reviews
Searching for the causes of mental disorders is as exciting as it it complex. The relationship between pathophysiology and its overt manifestations is exceedingly intricate, and often the causes of a disorder are elusive at best. This book is an invaluable resource for anyone trying to track these causes, whether they be clinical researchers, public health practitioners, or psychiatric epidemiologists-in-training. Uniting theory and practice in very clear language, it makes a wonderful contribution to both epidemiologic and psychiatric research. Rather than attempting to review the descriptive epidemiology of mental disorders, this book gives much more dynamic exposition of the thinking and techniques used to establish it.
Starting out by tracing the brief history of psychiatric epidemiology, the book describes the study of risk factors as causes of mental disorders. Subsequent sections discuss approaches to investigation of biologic, genetic, or social causes and the statistical analysis of study results. The book concludes by following some of the problems involved in the search for genetic causes of mental disorders, and more complex casual relationships.
Review
"This is a much needed text for psychiatric epidemiologists."--Doody's
Review
"This is a much needed text for psychiatric epidemiologists."--Doody's
"Overall, this book is an outstanding accomplishment. It fills a gap in the area of psychiatric research where there is a dearth of up-to-date, discipline-specific texts...an excellent text which sets a new benchmark for epidmeiological thinking in mental health research and goes a long way towards making the concepts of the discipline accessible to psychiatric researchers in general."--Psychological Medicine
"If only all textbooks were written like this one. The authors of Psychiatric Epidemiology have assembled a highly cogent examination of the past, present, and possible future of psychiatric epidemiology, doing so in a way that anyone interested in the scientific method--including its limitations--can be immersed."--Psychiatric Times
Table of Contents
PART I. Psychiatric epidemiology, then and now.
1. The burden of mental illness
2. The arc of epidemiology
3. Searching for the causes of mental disorders
PART II. RISK FACTORS AS CAUSES OF MENTAL DISORDERS.
4. What is a cause?
5. Detecting causes
6. Study designs
7. Relationship among causes
8. Measures of association
PART III. COHORT DESIGNS IN PSYCHIATRIC EPIDEMIOLOGY.
9. Prototypical cohort study
10. Diversity of cohort studies
11. Casual inference: a thought experiment
12. Confounding: What it is and what can be done
13. Unequal attrition under different types of follow-up
14. Differential misclassification
PART IV. CASE CONTROL DESIGNS IN PSYCHIATRIC EPIDEMIOLOGY.
15. Logic of the case control design
16. Applications of the case control study
17. Choosing controls
18. Comparability and the case control study
PART V. CASE CONTROL DESIGNS IN BIOLOGIC PSYCHIATRY.
19. Biologic studies in psychiatry
20. Choosing cases in biologic psychiatry
21. Choosing controls in biologic psychiatry
PART VI. ANALYZING THE DATA.
22. Gauging associations
23. Establishing associations
24. Planning studies: power and sample size
25. Statistical adjustment
26. Survival analysis
27. Analysis of Interaction
PART VII. THE SEARCH FOR GENETIC CAUSES OF MENTAL DISORDERS.
28. Integrating epidemiology with genetics
29. Genetic association studies
30. Modern family history studies
31. Twin studies of heritability
32. Genetic linkage studies
33. Designs for the genomic era
PART VIII. COMPLEX CASUAL RELATIONSHIPS.
34. Eco-epidemiology
35. Casual explanation within a risk factor framework
36. Casual explanation outside the black box
37. Dependent and dynamic processes
Appendix I. Our approach to epidemiologic concepts and methods.
Appendix II.(Appendix to Chapter 13) Application of survival analysis to PDSE data.
Glossary.