Vital Statistics, Demography, and Schizophrenia: Editor's Introduction

The Guest Editor introduces this Theme Issue of the Schizophrenia Bulletin with an overview of the kinds of subject matters appropriate for a comprehensive understanding of the vital statistics and demography relating to schizophrenia and schizophrenic patients—births, deaths, marriages, divorces, fertility, age, sex, race, occupation, place of residence, season of birth, class mobility, homelessness, criminality, industrialization, and suicide. Major sources of the statistics relating to schizophrenia are listed. He calls for a national case register and the use of a unique identifier with linkage across data bases in various branches of government so as to inform a descriptive as well as an experimental (hypothesis-testing) epidemiology.