Life Events and Psychiatric Illness: A Study of 100 Patients and 100 Controls

One hundred hospitalized psychiatric patients and 100 general hospital patients, with no history of psychiatric illness, were matched for cost of hospital care, age, sex, race, and marital status. Both groups were predominantly composed of people receiving active treatment during short periods of hospitalization. They were studied with a structured interview with respect to present illness, medical, social and psychiatric history, mental status, family history (social and psychiatric) and a wide variety of life events of the remote and recent past. The psychiatric patients differed from the non-psychiatric patients principally in that they had a higher incidence of psychiatric disorder among their relatives, a higher incidence of interpersonal discord during the present illness and a lower incidence of non-psychiatric hospitalization in the past year only. The two groups resembled each other with respect to education, income, remote and recent bereavement and separation, medical and surgical history prior to the past year, recent illnesses of any type in relatives and spouses, proportion of breadwinners, job stability, birth rank, size of family of origin, size of present family, legal history, military history, loss of property, debts and recent trips. It was concluded that when psychiatric hospital patients and general hospital patients from the same medical centre were matched for major sociological variables and durations of hospital stay, they also matched with respect to a history of a great majority of stresses and other recent and remote life events, even though the general hospital patients chosen had never had a psychiatric illness at any time in their lives. The data did not support the notion that "psychiatric illness" is a unitary phenomenon distinguishable from "non-psychiatric illness" on the basis of the factors studied.