Skip to main content
  • Oral presentation
  • Open access
  • Published:

How prevalent are mental disorders in developing countries?

Background

A national epidemiologic survey was conducted in Morocco in 2003-2004 in order to assess the prevalence of mental disorders in a representative sample of the general population.

Methods and subjects

About 5,600 persons accepted to be interviewed. The instrument used was the M.I.N.I. in its colloquial Moroccan Arabic, which was validated in a previous study.

Results

The point prevalence of mental disorders was as follows: depressive disorders: 26.5%; suicidal ideation: 16.6%; bipolar disorder: 3.2%; Panic disorder: 6.6%; Social phobia: 6.3%; OCD: 6.6%; PTSD: 2.1%; alcohol dependence: 1.4%; substance abuse: 3.0%; GAD: 9.3%.

All in all, about 48.9% of the sample showed one or another mental disorder. Comparisons will be shown with the same instruments in some European and some African countries.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

Authors

Rights and permissions

Open Access This article is published under license to BioMed Central Ltd. This is an Open Access article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 International License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Cite this article

Moussaoui, D., Kadri, N. How prevalent are mental disorders in developing countries?. Ann Gen Psychiatry 7 (Suppl 1), S31 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1186/1744-859X-7-S1-S31

Download citation

  • Published:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1186/1744-859X-7-S1-S31

Keywords