Public, health professional and legislator perspectives on the concept of psychiatric disease: a population-based survey
Bibliographic record
Abstract
OBJECTIVE: To assess which mental health-related states of being are perceived as diseases by psychiatrists, non-psychiatric physicians, nurses, parliament members and laypeople. DESIGN AND SETTING: A population-based, mailed survey in Finland. PARTICIPANTS: Respondents from a random sample of 3000 laypeople, 1500 physicians, 1500 nurses and all 200 members of the parliament (MPs) of Finland. PRIMARY OUTCOME MEASURES: Respondents' perspectives on 20 mental health-related states of being as diseases, measuring the extent of agreement with the claim: '[This state of being] is a disease'. RESULTS: Of the 6200 people approached, we received 3259 eligible responses (53%). Two conditions (schizophrenia and autism) were considered to be diseases by at least 75% and two states (grief and homosexuality) were considered not to be diseases by at least 75% in each group. A majority (at least 50% in each group) considered seven states as diseases (anorexia, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, bulimia, depression, generalised anxiety disorder, panic disorder and personality disorder) and three not to be diseases (absence of sexual desire, premature ejaculation and transsexualism). In six states, there was a wide divergence of opinion (alcoholism, drug addiction, gambling addiction, insomnia, social anxiety disorder and work exhaustion). Psychiatrists were significantly more inclined to considering states of being as diseases relative to other groups, followed by non-psychiatric physicians, nurses, MPs and laypeople. CONCLUSIONS: Respondents agreed that some conditions, such as schizophrenia and autism, are diseases and other states, such as grief and homosexuality, are not; for others, there was considerable disagreement. Psychiatrists are more inclined to consider mental health-related states of being as diseases compared with other physicians, who, in turn, are more inclined than other constituencies. Understanding notions of disease may underlie important debates in public policy and practice in areas of mental health and behaviour, and have implications for resource allocation and stigma.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".