Neuroscience and Psychiatry: Open Access

Psychiatric Epidemology Journals

 This traces the historical decisions, concepts and key professional partnerships which laid the foundations for the development of American psychiatric epidemiology during the 20th century, up to the institutional consolidation of the discipline, around 1980, when the third edition of the Mental Disorders Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM-III) was published. The 'functional matrix' of Thomas Kuhn is activated as a structure for the institutional and intellectual development of a discipline to be studied as separate but interconnected elements, without the two developing in tandem. Identifying the strengths, as well as the frailties and internal divisions of the discipline as it developed, reveals a paradoxical situation: a time lag, on the one hand, between the institutionalization of psychiatric epidemiology and public recognition; and, on the other, the weak coherence of its intellectual components. We briefly trace the origins of the split among the models of mental disorders of the discipline and suggest that the lack of coherence between them has prevented psychiatric epidemiology from attaining, in the Kuhnian sense, the status of a normal scientific discipline.. Without greater explicit attention to the discipline 's intellectual rationale, psychiatric epidemiology will continue to retain a strong institutional dimension and weak intellectual matrix.  

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