Gender, social mobility and psychiatric diagnoses

Data from a Swedish cohort born in 1953 and studied through to 1983 is used to examine the relationship between the incidence of psychiatric disorder, parental socio-economic status and intergenerational social mobility. No difference is found in the over-all incidence of in-patient treatment between men and women, but there are considerable differences in the incidence of individual diagnoses. As found in other studies, rates of schizophrenia and substance abuse are greater among men than women, while rates of neurosis are greater among women. The data generally support the drift explanation of inequalities in health rather than the social causation hypothesis, but there is some variation by both gender and diagnosis. Little association is found between parental status, measured when cohort members were aged 10, and the incidence of disorder, except in the case of substance abuse, but there is a strong association between disorder and own status, measured at age 27 yr. By far the highest rates of disorder are found among those members of the cohort who are not in the workforce. Both schizophrenia and neurosis exhibit strong drift effects; there is some evidence that the children of higher status parents have a heightened risk of being diagnosed as schizophrenic; in the case of substance abuse both downwards social mobility and low class origins appear to be implicated in the cumulative incidence of in-patient treatment.