There's a widespread belief that mental illness is getting more common, or that it has got more common in recent years.
A new study in the British Journal of Psychiatry says: no, it's not. They looked at the UK APMS mental health surveys, which were done in 1993, 2000 and 2007. Long-time readers will rememberthese.
The authors of the new paper analyzed the data by birth cohort, i.e. when you were born, and by age at the time of the survey. If mental illness were rising, you'd predict that people born more recently would have higher rates of mental illness at any given age.
The headline finding: there was no cohort effect, implying that rates of mental illness aren't changing. There was a strong age effect: in men, rates peak at about age 50; in women the data is rather messy but in general the rate is flat up to ...
