Reimagining psychiatric epidemiology in a global frame : toward a social and conceptual history / edited by Anne M. Lovell and Gerald M. Oppenheimer.

"Psychiatric epidemiology, like cancer, heart disease, or AIDS epidemiology, increasingly dominates the bio-politics of nations and of worldwide health campaigns like the Global Burden of Disease. Yet this is the first book-length history of psychiatric epidemiology, arguably the oldest of epidemiological disciplines, albeit the slowest to develop intellectually and institutionally. The epidemiology of mental disorders and mental health differs radically from that of other diseases and health conditions in that it studies subjective states, difficult to objectify or precisely define. Despite these obstacles, over many decades, researchers, governments, and international organizations have continually attempted to measure mental states, their distribution and presumed causes in the hope of informing public policy, clinical treatment, social reform, and population management. Since the nineteenth century, epidemiology and earlier proto-epidemiology in dissimilar contexts have served strikingly different purposes, from census counts of the "insane" to imperialist and racist psychological profiles of subaltern groups to attempts to measure diagnostic entities in an entire nation. We argue that these multiple historical paths resulted not in a uniform field based on common paradigms as was the case for cardio-vascular and cancer epidemiology, but in a plurality of psychiatric epidemiologies, driven by different intellectual questions, reformist ideals, national cultures, and social control objectives"-- Provided by publisher.