CG123 Common mental health disorders - National Institute for ...

Common mental health disorderssymptoms that would warrant intervention from healthcare professionals. Most havenon-specific mixed anxiety and depressive symptoms, but a proportion have morespecific depressive disorder or anxiety disorders including panic disorder, phobias,OCD or PTSD.The location, time and duration of the survey are not the only factors to influenceprevalence rates. A number of demographic and socioeconomic factors are associatedwith a higher risk of disorders, including gender, age, marital status, ethnicity andsocioeconomic deprivation. These will be discussed below.GenderDepression and anxiety disorders tend to have a higher prevalence in women.Prevalence rates of depression have consistently been found to be between 1.5 and 2.5times higher in women than men (Waraich et al., 2004). In the ONS survey(McManus et al., 2009) women were more likely than men to have a disorder (19.7and 12.5%, respectively), with rates significantly higher for women across all categoriesof disorder except for panic disorder and OCD. The greatest differencebetween genders was among South Asian adults where the age-standardised rateamong women (34.3% of South Asian women) was three times that of men (10.3%of South Asian men). Reasons cited in the 2007 ONS survey (McManus et al., 2009)include the impact of having children (Bebbington et al., 1991), exposure to domesticor sexual violence (Patel et al., 2006), adverse experiences in childhood andwomen’s relative poverty (Patel et al., 1999; Piccinelli & Wilkinson, 2000).AgeIn the 2007 ONS survey (McManus et al., 2009) rates varied by age, with those aged75 years and over least likely to have a disorder (6.3% of men and 12.2% of women).In women, the rate peaked among 45- to 54-year-olds of whom 25% met the criteria forat least one disorder. Among men, the rate was highest in 25- to 54-year-olds (14.6% of25- to 34-year-olds, 15.0% of 35- to 44-year-olds and 14.5% of 45- to 54-year-olds).Marital statusWomen across all marital-status categories were more likely than their male counterpartsto have disorders in the 2007 ONS survey (McManus et al., 2009), except fordivorced people in whom the prevalence for men and women was very similar (26.6%for women and 27.7% for men). Among men, those currently divorced had the greatestlikelihood of having a disorder, but variation by other marital status categories wasless pronounced. For women the rate of disorder was high for divorced women, buteven higher for separated women (33.0%). Men and women who were married orwidowed had the lowest observed rates of disorder (10.1% of married men and 16.3%of married women; 10.4% widowed men and 17.4% widowed women).EthnicityIn the 2007 ONS survey (McManus et al., 2009), after age-standardisation of the data,there was little variation between white, black and South Asian men in the rates ofany disorder. However, among women rates of all disorders (except phobias) were19