Psychiatric Disorder Onset and First Treatment Contact in the United States and Ontario

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Abstract
Objective:The authors describe the timing of the first treatment contact following new-onset DSM-III-R mood, anxiety, and addictive disorders in community samples from the United States and Ontario, Canada, before and after passage of the Ontario Health Insurance Plan.Method:The authors drew data from the National Comorbidity Survey (NCS) (N=8,098) and the mental health supplement to the Ontario Health Survey (OHS) (N=9,953). They assessed psychiatric disorders with a modified version of the Composite International Diagnostic Interview; they also assessed retrospectively age at disorder onset and first treatment contact. They used the Kaplan-Meier method to generate time-to-treatment curves and survival analysis to compare time-to-treatment intervals across the two surveys.Results:The overall time-to-treatment curves revealed substantial differences between disorders that were consistent across the two surveys. In both surveys, panic disorder had the highest probability of first-year treatment (NCS, 65.6%...