A Census of Psychiatric Cases in two Contrasting Communities

Abstract

During recent years members of the Medical Research Council Pneumoconiosis Research Unit have carried out a number of studies of the prevalence and incidence of common diseases in two populations in South Wales and attempted to relate differences in morbidity to known differences in social and environmental factors (Cochrane and Miall, 1956). The communities studied are the Rhondda Fach, a mining valley with a population in 1951 of 19,722 (aged over 15 years) living in a contiguous series of eight small towns, and a number of parishes in the Vale of Glamorgan, approximately ten miles from the Rhondda Fach, in which the population of 4,621 (aged over 15 years) is spread over a relatively large agricultural area. These will be referred to as the Rhondda and the Vale. They were originally chosen to provide a complete mining community (in which the prevalence of diseases of the lungs in miners and ex-miners could be estimated) and a contrasting, predominantly rural, population respectively.