Debate on Psychiatric Epidemiology-Reply

From the Midtown Manhattan Study to the Epidemiologic Catchment Area Study: the advent of mechanical objectivity in psychiatry

“…The third conclusion is even more fundamental: it concerns the conception of the psychiatric symptom and the role of the clinician. In the ‘Debate on psychiatric epidemiology’, which can be found in several issues of the Archives of General Psychiatry in 1980, Myrna Weissman and Gerald Klerman (1980) felt that the ECA Study indicated a stronger commitment to the ontological view of old European clinical psychiatry: Psychiatric epidemiology, along with other fields of mental health research during the immediate post-World War II period, rejected the classic 19th century view of diagnosis and classification associated with Kraepelin and Bleuler, and adopted the view that there was a continuum (or spectrum) from mental health through mental illness. (pp.…”

On the cross-generational expression of psychiatric disorders: Commentary on Caspi et al. (2026).

“…In reading this work, I was reminded of the debates in the pages of Archives of General Psychiatry in 1980 regarding how psychiatric nosology should be operationalized in field studies of psychiatric epidemiology. The debates are multifold, but to boil down one among many issues, Weissman and Klerman (1980) argued that progress in the field would be advanced through clinical interview schedules that operationalized discrete disorders. Srole and Fischer (1980) argued that clinical diagnoses are appropriate in specialized settings, but had limited utility when assessing general population samples.…”