[Prevalence of serious mental pathology in the city of San Luis]

This work includes part of the results of the first epidemiological research on mental health held at San Luis City, aimed to estimate adult prevalence rate of mental pathology on San Luis' adult population. It has also been considered the prevalent kind of disorders. In both cases, it has been taken into account five domains of independent variables, due to sociodemographic characteristics: sex, age, educational level, occupational level, and residence zone.

The methodology is based on the epidemiological descriptive and transversal model. The assessment instrument, the Millon Clinical Multiaxial Inventory-II, was administrated to a representative adult sample, designed by a probabilistic sample methodology.

The clinical measurement of Personality Pathology Scales and Sever Clinical Syndromes Scales showed a prevalence rate of 25,69% of serious mental pathology in general population, which is higher in women, 27,13%; than in men, 24,19%. In accordance to independent variables, there is a higher prevalence in elderly people, although there is no correlation with the number of symptoms; there is a lower prevalence among people with more years of education, with a relative correlation with number of symptoms-; and some professions showed higher scores than others, also with a relative correlation with number of symptoms. Considering the kind of mental disorders, there was a high prevalence of paranoid disorder and of alucinatory disorder, both in the women and men's samples.

Finally, we found that the prevalence rates of serious mental pathology in San Luis population are similar to those obtained by previous studies in Argentina.