A systematic review and meta-analysis of prevalence of seven psychiatric disorders in India.

Abstract

After the National Mental Health Survey in 2016, multiple individual studies showed inconsistencies in the prevalence rates of psychiatric disorders in India. We performed a meta-analysis to estimate an up-to-date pooled estimate of the prevalence of depression, alcohol use disorder (AUD), anxiety disorder (AD), intellectual disability, suicidal attempt/death, autism, and bipolar disorder (BD) in India. We performed a systematic bibliographic search in Pub Med, Global Health Data Exchange (GHDx), and Google Scholar, along with a manual search for peer-reviewed epidemiological studies reporting the prevalence of depression, AUD, AD, MR, suicidal attempt/death, autism, and BD in India from January 1980 till March 2022. Adopting a random-effects model, we performed the meta-analysis using "MetaXL" software. A total of 79 studies were included: depression (n = 28), AUD (n = 14), AD (n = 12), intellectual disability (n = 8), suicidal attempt/death (n = 7), autism (n = 6) and BD (n = 4). The pooled prevalence of depression and AUD was 12.4% (95% CI 9.4-15.9) (P < 0.001, I2 = 100%) and 21.5% (95% CI 14.1-30.0) (P < 0.001, I2 = 100%), respectively. AD, intellectual disability and suicidal attempt/death showed a prevalence of 11.6% (95% CI 8.1-15.7) (P < 0.001, I2 = 99%), 1% (95% CI 0.5-1.6) (P < 0.001, I2 = 98%) and 0.5% (95% CI 0.3-0.8) (P < 0.001, I2 = 100%), respectively. The meta-analysis in autism and BD showed pooled prevalence of 0.3% (95% CI 0.1-0.6) (P < 0.001, I2 = 96%) and 0.3% (95% CI 0.2-0.4) (P < 0.001, I2 = 78%), respectively. Subgroup analysis showed an increased prevalence of AD in the urban [24.3% (95% CI 3.7-52.9)] and younger [16.7% (95% CI 5.1-32.7)] population. The prevalence of depression and AD increased during the last two decades on decadal prevalence analysis. The findings could be used for appropriate policy measures and guiding subsequent national mental health surveys.