Prevalence of common mental disorders in Italy

Abstract

A high proportion of adults in Italy have a history of mood, anxiety or alcohol disorders. The lower than expected prevalence estimate of alcohol use disorder may be due to under-reporting or to low social harm from alcohol consumption.

Prevalence of common mental disorders and their work consequences in France, according to occupational category

“…In any case, the use of different tools creates less of a problem when the focus is on identifying the determinants of psychiatric disorders. Our results about social inequalities according to sex and employment status point in the same direction as international [WHO International Consortium in Psychiatric Epidemiology, 2000;Fryers et al, 2003;Kessler et al, 2003] and European [European Commission, 2004;Fryers et al, 2004] results, especially the ESEMeD survey [Alonso et al, 2004b;De Girolamo et al, 2006]. Our results about social inequalities according to occupational category, however, are more specific than those in the literature.…”

Depressive symptoms among adults 18–69 years in Italy: results from the Italian behavioural risk factor surveillance system, 2007

“…Finally, we found a strong association between depressive symptoms and health-related quality of life. With some exceptions (Ayuso-Mateos et al 2001;Carta et al 1991;Mavreas et al 1986), our results reveal a prevalence generally higher than those reported by other European epidemiological studies that used a similar reference period (from 1 week to 1 month) (Bijl et al 1998;Faravelli et al 2004;Gigantesco et al 2006;de Girolamo et al 2006;Jenkins et al 2003). The rates of mood disorders in those studies ranged from 2.3% in Great Britain to 7.3% in Norway.…”

“…The rates of mood disorders in those studies ranged from 2.3% in Great Britain to 7.3% in Norway. In Italy the prevalence of any current mood disorder reported by the European Study on Epidemiology of Mental Disorders (ESEMeD) was 1.5% (de Girolamo et al 2006). However, most have used more detailed diagnostic instruments that permitted patients to be classified as having clinical depression (Lewis et al 1992;Wing et al 1990) rather than depressive symptoms as detected by the brief two-question screen used in our study.…”

Prevalence of and Potential Influencing Factors for Alcohol Dependence in Europe

“…Most importantly in this category, the early round of the World Mental Health Survey in European countries [23] assessed AD only if at least one criterion for alcohol abuse was fulfilled; as a consequence, the prevalence of AD was severely underestimated by the World Mental Health Surveys (WMHS) [24]. The WMHS were used in estimating AD for Belgium (part of the overall estimate; see table 1), Bulgaria (see also [25,26], for details on the operationalization), the Czech Republic [27], France, Italy [28], Romania [29] and Spain [30]. For each of these countries the prevalence estimates had to be adjusted as these empirical estimates were severely underestimated; only people with a symptom of alcohol abuse were screened for AD.…”