Background: Psychiatric disorders are common in the community. The need of the hour is to develop epidemiological databases (registries) of adequate sample sizes with better funding and coordination, utilizing culture-specific study instruments, which would aid in delineating the etiology and management of mental disorders. With this in mind and to bridge the gap, a case control study has been performed to find out various epidemiological variants of mental illness among the people of Ahmedabad city.
Objective: To study associated risk factors in patients with mental illness and in normal persons, that is, controls and to find odds ratio (OR) for comparison of various risk factors in cases (mentally ill) and controls (normal person not mentally ill).
Materials and Methods: Adults aged 1865 years having mental illness were considered as cases and those who were not having the mental illness were considered as controls. The cases were coming to attend the Psychiatric Out-Patient Department of Civil Hospital Ahmedabad (CHA). They belong to various parts of Ahmedabad District and neighborhood community of CHA. The controls were from the neighborhood community of CHA. Study was conducted from March 2012 to April 2013.
Result: OR was estimated to be 1, which signifies that difference in gender does not increase the risk for mental illness. Mean age in cases was found to be 35.49 (11.92) years. A total of 125 cases (75.75%) and 140 controls (84.84%) were Hindus followed by 36 cases (21.81%) and 23 controls (13.93%) of Muslims. It was observed that unemployment increases the risk for mental illness by nearly 16 times (OR = 16.15).
Conclusion: The results clearly indicate that mental illness is multifactorial in origin and by just studying a single cause is not enough for its prevention or cure. The need of the hour is to study the whole network of mental illness causation so that better cure and prevention could be planned.
Key words: Case control, mental illness, sociodemography
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