Polling for Mental Health

By John Leo. Reported by Ruth Mehrtens Calvin/Washington

A $15 million study shows that one in five has a disorder

Psychiatrists have long assumed that depression is the most common mental problem in the U.S. That assumption is wrong, according to a $15 million six-year survey on psychiatric ailments conducted by the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH). Anxiety disorders, including phobias, panic disorders and obsessive-compulsive disorders, are the most widespread, say the survey results, afflicting 13.1 million Americans, or 8.3% of adults 18 years of age and over.

The study, by far the largest and most thorough of the 80-odd major surveys to take the psychic pulse of America since 1900, reports that during a given six-month period, one in five adults, or about 29 million people, suffers from mental problems. Only a fifth of those affected had recently sought professional help, mostly from general physicians rather than mental-health specialists.

The NIMH interviewers questioned nearly 10,000 people living in and around Baltimore, St. Louis and New Haven. The responses were fed into computers and checked against criteria for 13 or more mental disorders listed in the American Psychiatric Association's latest Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. Other sections of the survey, covering 2,500 institutionalized patients and some 6,000 people in Los Angeles and Durham, N.C., are expected to be released next year.

The survey found that women tend to suffer from phobias and depression, while men score significantly higher than women in the abuse of alcohol or dependence on drugs and in long-term antisocial behavior. When all disorders are taken into account, men and women are about equally troubled. Earlier surveys showed that women were more psychiatrically disabled and had more symptoms than men, possibly because women tend to seek help for depression and men tend to hide theirs with alcohol. The current survey found that women seek professional help twice as frequently as men.

Among the other NIMH findings:

· Between 29% and 38% of those inter viewed at the three sites had experienced at least one psychiatric problem in their lifetime.

· Rates of disorder were far higher among those under 45. Abuse or dependence on alcohol and other drugs falls sharply after 44. Antisocial personality is a problem of the young, generally low among those over 45.

· College graduates have far fewer ailments than non-college grads.

· For some unknown reason, the phobia rate was extremely high in Baltimore, while alcohol problems were highest in New Haven and St. Louis.

· Only 1% of those surveyed were suffering from some form of schizophrenia, and only half of these cases received professional help.

The finding that one of five American adults is troubled at any given time coincides roughly with the conclusions of earlier studies. The Midtown Manhattan study, done in the 1950s, reported that 23% of the population had severe disorders, and up to 80% had some mild level of impairment. The Stirling County study, completed in Nova Scotia in 1952, said that 57% of those interviewed had a disorder during a lifetime and 20% were in need of psychiatric attention at the time of the survey. "The most important thing is not what the overall rate is," says Dr. Darrel Regier, director of the NIMH survey, "but that we now know what the distribution of disorders is. This is establishing a baseline for future research."

With reporting by Ruth Mehrtens Calvin/Washington