Mental disorders encompass a wide range of mental health conditions that affect one’s mood, thinking, and behavior, such as depression, anxiety, substance use disorders, schizophrenia, or eating disorders. Mental disorders are common – it is estimated that one in three individuals experience a mental disorder during their life, with anxiety and depressive disorders being the most frequent. Individuals with mental disorders tend to be at increased risk of developing other comorbid mental disorders as well as somatic diseases. Additionally, mental disorders are associated with excess mortality.
Our research at Department of Clinical Epidemiology aims to improve the understanding of the causes and consequences of mental disorders and their interaction with other diseases as well as social determinants. We are interested in understanding who is at risk of mental disorders, as well as understanding the health and social implications of having a mental disorder. As part of our research, we also consider methodological issues, such as the ways to identify individuals with mental disorders across the different data sources that we work with, and the development of new metrics to help quantify the impact of mental disorders.
At PSEMAU, which is the research group in Psychiatric and Social Epidemiology and Health Metrics from Department of Clinical Epidemiology at Aarhus University, we use data from administrative registers to conduct our research. In an attempt to make our research as open and reproducible as possible, we have developed a project at the Open Science Framework to share data documentation and programming code for all data used in the studies we publish. While the underlying data cannot be made publicly available due to legal and ethical reasons, we hope that our documentation and code might help researchers with access to similar data to (i) replicate our research, (ii) replicate our designs and analyses for other research questions, and (iii) get inspiration on how to transform the raw data into data that can be used for epidemiological studies.
