[Case-control studies in psychiatry: causality, design and warnings]

This present paper is mainly methodological and has been written with the aim of helping researchers in psychiatry to produce results with higher quality and help readers to have adequate assessment values of others. Brief reflection is made on the most important conditions that must be fulfilled to prove a causality hypothesis, regardless of the investigation design used. However, the main purpose of the text is to examine and illustrate how these conditions work under a case-control study environment. Besides outlining the basic aspects concerning design and analysis, areas extremely illustrated with examples of case and controls in psychiatry found in the literature, a number of suggestions to avoid pitfalls that can invalidate research efforts developed using case-control methodology is offered.