ABSTRACT
The Midtown Manhattan Mental Health Study, launched in 1952 and first fielded in 1954, has taken one step in the direction, having evolved from a cross-sectional epidemiological investigation of a general population into a two-stage longitudinal follow-up study. The base-line investigation focused on a rigorous probability sample of 1660 adults between the ages of 20 and 59 that was highly representative of its parent population. Thomas Rennie, the Midtown I senior psychiatrist, chose 83 of those items for their clinical relevance and their time reference to the recent past, and the remainder, referring to the preadult period, only for lending temporal perspective to the currently visible manifestations of mental health status. The consistent interage trends in both 1954 and 1974 could have been extrapolated to a prediction that at follow-up the general mental health in every age group would have slipped further into more unfavorable impaired frequencies.
