Estimating, Locating, and Comparing Mental Disorders in the Second Part of the Twentieth Century

Psychiatric epidemiology – the study of the distribution of mental disorders within a population – emerged on the scientific scene during the second half of the 20th century. However, unlike the fields of psychiatry, psychology, and psychoanalysis, psychiatric epidemiology has yet to be studied by historians, largely due to the fact that it was only professionalized much later. Several factors can explain the field’s relative “invisibility”: the still recent standardization of its methods, the diversity of local scientific traditions, nations’ varying public health policies, the range of different sites for observation (rural or urban studies, comparisons between neighbouring communities, insular populations, cohorts) as well as the varieties of interdisciplinary studies implemented within the scientific community (medicine, psychology, sociology, anthropology, biostatistics). These elements highlight the diversity of potential sources, and thus necessarily bring forward the question: how should one go about writing a history of this largely unrecognized field?