TELEPHONE SURVEYS AS AN ALTERNATIVE FOR ESTIMATING PREVALENCE OF MENTAL-DISORDERS AND SERVICE UTILIZATION - A MONTREAL CATCHMENT-AREA STUDY

Background: Large-scale mental health surveys have provided invaluable information regarding the prevalence of specific mental disorders and service use for mental health reasons. Unfortunately, because vast su rveys conducted face to face are very costly, many countries and provi nces do not embark upon this path of research, thus depriving themselv es of a rich source of data useful for service planning. Method: As an alternative, the authors undertook a telephone survey with a sample o f 893 residents from a Montreal catchment area. Mental disorders were assessed by the Composite International Diagnostic Interview Simplifie d (CIDIS), an instrument especially designed to be used in mail or tel ephone surveys. Service utilization was measured by an instrument simi lar to those used in recent large Canadian ol American surveys. Result s: The prevalence rate for any mental disorder was lower in this study than in some large-scale epidemiological surveys reviewed. This could be explained by methodological differences, such as number of disorde rs covered and period of reference. With regard to specific mental dis orders, results appeared very similar to those of other studies. Conce rning service utilization, rates tended to be higher than in other stu dies, and this finding could reflect real differences between Quebec a nd other Canadian provinces or the United States. Conclusions: Aside f rom being lower in cost, telephone surveys can yield results comparabl e to those obtained in large-scale epidemiological surveys conducted b y means of face-to-face interviews.