The Midtown Manhattan Study

Conducted through the 1950s under the direction of the sociologist Leo Srole and colleagues and published in 1962 as Mental Health in the Metropolis, the Midtown Manhattan Study was a large-scale interdisciplinary survey of the mental health of roughly sixteen hundred adult residents of a defined section of Manhattan's Upper East Side, aged between twenty and fifty-nine, combining approaches from psychiatry, epidemiology and social science to examine how a person's broader social and economic circumstances related to their psychological well-being. Interviewers assessed each participant's mental health status using structured interviews and clinical ratings, and the study's results were striking: only about eighteen and a half percent of the sample was rated as free of significant psychiatric symptoms, the large majority showed some degree of symptomatology, and roughly a quarter were rated as sufficiently impaired to be considered incapacitated in their daily functioning. As one of the most ambitious psychiatric epidemiological surveys undertaken up to that time in its scale, complexity and interdisciplinary scope, the Midtown Manhattan Study provided an influential evidence base documenting how widespread significant mental health difficulty was within an ordinary urban population rather than only among those already receiving psychiatric treatment, and its findings helped build the case for the community mental health movement in the United States, contributing to the reasoning behind the federal Community Mental Health Act of 1963.