Comparisons of the 2007 National Survey of Mental Health and Wellbeing and the 2003–2004 New Zealand Mental Health Survey

Abstract

Probably only those involved with a major survey understand the extensive commitment required for such a survey to be prepared, run, analysed and written up. Congratulations are in order to all who played a role in the Australian 2007 National Survey of Mental Health and Wellbeing (NSMHWB), particularly to the Advisory Group for the survey, the Australian Bureau of Statistics, who actually ran the survey and performed the field work, and the researchers who have put together the suite of papers for this issue of theAustralian and New Zealand Journal of Psychiatry. It is good to see, even at this early stage in the analysis, that policy implications have been drawn, where possible. This editorial sets out to compare the findings from the Australian 2007 NSMHWB and the New Zealand Mental Health Survey (NZMHS), which was carried out in late 2003 and 2004. Both have resulted in an issue of the Australian and New Zealand Journal of Psychiatry: the October 2006 issue for the NZMHS [1 11] and this issue for the 2007 NZMHWB [12 17], which allows readers to obtain an overview of the main findings all at once instead of having to track papers across multiple journals as they are published. Of course there will be many more papers from each survey but to have the core descriptive papers presented together in one issue is a bonus not available to many of the other countries that have also participated in the World Mental Health Survey Initiative. Before comparing the findings it is necessary to set the context by describing the similarities and differences between the two surveys. The major features of the surveys were the same: they were both crosssectional surveys with national stratified multistage probability samples, they both interviewed participants face to face using a computer-assisted personal interview, and both used the English-language version of the Composite International Diagnostic Interview (CIDI 3.0), a fully structured interview that can be administered by trained lay interviewers, making it possible to obtain large samples. The common features make these two surveys comparable with each other and with other surveys in the World Mental Health Consortium (www.hcp.med.harvard. edu/wmh/). There are, however, some important differences between the 2007 Australian NSMHWB and the New Zealand NZMHS. Although the CIDI 3.0 was used in both countries, different approaches were taken to meet the common goal of having an interview with an average completion time of 90 min, the maximum average length thought to be acceptable to potential participants in the absence of remuneration. Certain diagnostic and demographic sections were omitted from both surveys but only the New Zealand survey retained the Part 1/Part 2 structure whereby a subset of participants completed some sections. This enabled more sections to be included in New Zealand but at the expense of the sample size for those included in Part 2. In Australia all participants entered or at least were screened for all sections included in the interview. The second major difference is that diagnoses reported so far from the NZMHS are DSM-IV J. Elisabeth Wells, Associate Professor