A Contribution to The Aetiology of Manic-Depressive Insanity (1940)

The Expectation of Manic‑Depressive Psychoses for the General Population

 

The expectation of manic‑depressive psychoses for the general population has hitherto been calculated by Weinberg1 a shorter meth­od. I have therefore collected all the German works on the fre­quency of psychiatric abnormalities in the general population and recalculated the frequency of manic‑depressive psychoses by the Strömgren method. This provides a material of 4,68 males and 4,407 females, all over the age of 10, among whom were discovered five male and six female manic‑depressives. The population values corrected by the Strömgren method are 1379.08 males and 1511.74 females. The frequency of manic‑depressive psychoses there is among the

Males      0.3636% ± 0.1619%

Females   0.3669% ± 0.1617%

Total       0.3805% ± 0.1145%

One can therefore say that the frequencies of manic‑depressive psychoses among the parents, sibs, and children of manic‑depressives are thirty to sixty times as high as in the general population. The publications from which I have taken the figures for the general population used above are the following: