This is the second post in a series examining the idea that one in four people suffer from mental illness at some point in their lives. Those who read the first, and the comments below it, will know that this much-quoted statistic has no apparant basis in the scientific literature. In fact, I'm still not sure where it came from.
But there's more. One in four is a strikingly high figure. That's surely a large part of why it's so widely cited. Yet those studies which have attempted to estimate the lifetime prevalence of mental illness have all arrived at even highernumbers, from 1-in-3 to 2-in-3. 50% is typical. Compared to the actual data, one in four is rather conservative.
But is it really true that half of us suffer from mental illness at some point? Guess.
The 50%+ estimates come from population surveys which attempt to study a random ...
