Epidemiology and public mental health

Meet the business case

You are the psychiatrist on a regional planning committee. The paper in front of you argues for a new service, and its headline is that "almost half the population will experience a mental disorder in their lifetime, so we need capacity for half the region".^[4]

The next slide costs beds against that number. Nobody in the room has asked how many people are unwell this year, how severe they are, or how many are already getting care somewhere else.^[5][6]

Two exam questions are now live: which number should have been on that slide, and what would actually reduce the burden in this region? Everything below answers those two. The underlying method — stock-and-flow frequency measures, standardisation, RR to PAF arithmetic, the bias taxonomy, Hill, and screening PPV — lives in the foundations topic Epidemiology methods for psychiatry. This page is the population-action layer built on top of it.^[4][5][13]

References24ShowHide

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