ABSTRACT
Progress in the methods of assessment of adverse event histories over the past-quarter century has enabled advances in understanding the form and pattern of health change following such experiences; particularly concerning changes in psychiatric health. Such work has shown, for example, through the increasingly fine-mapping of particular event attributes to individual circumstances, that certain events appear to carry special salience for such health change (Brown et al., 1995, Lam et al., 1996). The origin of many of these ideas can be traced to the papers published by George Brown and colleagues during the early 1970s that addressed the concerns of those researchers initially sceptical of the causal role of adverse experience for the onset of psychiatric disorder (Brown et al., 1973a; Brown et al., 1973b; Brown, 1974). These publications provided the foundation to much of the work that has followed: giving increased attention to study design (the appropriateness of particular comparison groups), to event assessment methodology (the choice of equivalent time periods for comparison groups), to definitions of episode status and of onset timing, and subsequently stimulating ideas concerning the causal mechanisms through which adverse exposure might be seen to influence health change (originating from ideas of brought forward time).
