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This module follows on from the core introductory double module PSBS0002 Core Principles of Mental Health Research to develop students’ understanding of core principles in psychiatric epidemiology, including essential principles of study design, sampling and recruitment, measurement, causation and public mental health.

This module will give students an introduction into psychiatric epidemiology, allowing you to understand how to design population-based studies, understand the strengths and limitations of different study designs, understand the importance of chance, bias and confounding in assessing the role of causal risk factors and the importance of sampling representative populations. Students will learn that many of these principles underlie all observational research in psychiatry and psychology.

Students wishing to undertake quantitative research projects on observational / epidemiological data for their end-of-year dissertations are recommended to take this module. Taking this module is very much recommended for students who may are considering a PhD and/or a research career in epidemiological, social and/or applied clinical research in mental health.

Module Content

The module, which consists of a combination of taught lectures and group exercises, will cover issues, including:

• The burden of psychiatric illness: how to estimate incidence, prevalence and sample from different populations.
• Moving from correlation to causation: how chance, bias and confounding influence our understanding of psychiatric illnesses.
• Cheap and dirty: the value of cross-sectional and ecological studies in psychiatric epidemiology.
• A matter of control: why case-control studies are so valuable for studying rare psychiatric disorders.
• On greater prospects: cohort studies as the gold standard observational study design in epidemiology.
• Revisiting causation: a deeper understanding of causal inference in psychiatric research.
• Applying epidemiology to the population – translating psychiatric research into public mental health benefits.

Learning outcomes

These are the intended learning outcomes for the module:

• Students will be able to critically evaluate studies involving quantitative data (case-control studies, cohort studies, cross-sectional studies etc) in terms of the likelihood of causal relationships and the potential roles of chance, bias and confounding.
• Students will be able to describe appropriate strategies for measuring incidence and prevalence in populations.
• Students will be able to describe the features, advantages and disadvantages of cross-sectional, ecological, case control and cohort study designs, to give examples of these and to outline protocols based on them.
• Students will learn how to infer causation from observational studies and understands the limits of different observational designs.
• Students will learn the difference between beneficial outcomes for individuals and beneficial outcomes for populations, and how psychiatric epidemiology, and all psychiatric research, can be translated into effective public mental health policy.