Results from the Point of View of Epidemiological Research

Abstract

The German population of Mannheim can be regarded as representative of the current West German urban population generally. In turn, the randomly selected subjects are representative of the age cohorts investigated. We have good grounds for assuming that the refusal rate of 23% had no distorting effects. For this reason we believe that through our survey we have been able to ascertain the true rates of prevalence of psychogenic disorders among ca. 25- to 45-year-old Germans in the urban population: about one-quarter of the population suffer from psychogenic disorders of considerable severity — a severity corresponding to that present among a consulting patient population. This rate lies well above that found by Dilling et al. (1984) among a rural, small-town Bavarian population which was also researched using the Goldberg-Cooper Interview (although not with such psychoanalytical detail and without application of the IS). On the other hand the prevalence rates revealed by the Mid-town Manhattan Study (USA), by the Stirling County Study (Canada), and by E.Winter (Berlin) were considerably higher; however, these studies predominantly investigated lifelong prevalence and did not measure degree of severity so precisely.