ABSTRACT
Because of the inherent difficulties of definition and diagnosis, psychiatric registers are necessarily of the latter type. The growing interest in psychiatric epidemiology recognised the fundamental problems of measuring morbidity, but also the potential of registers to complement and facilitate community morbidity studies, and provide proxy data for them. Lack of such expertise may partly explain criticisms that information produced by case registers has merely duplicated routine service statistics more easily obtained in other ways, or has been inappropriate to local needs. It seems likely that case registers in the future will have closer ties to local health management for funding and staffing, and their activities will be influenced by these links. An obvious gap in the coverage provided by psychiatric registers is primary health care of mentally ill patients by general practitioners and others.
