A cross-national comparison of patterns of utilization and psychiatric care

The importance of the outcomes of Hollingshead and Redlich's Social Class and Mental Illness in Community is clearly marked by the proliferation of comments and similar studies which replete available literature since the publication of this original work. The objectives of this paper are (a) to determine the relationship between social class and the utilization of a public psychiatric facility in Nigeria; (b) examine the range of treated patients in psychiatric facilities in a technologically developed Euroamerican society in relation to a developing country such as Nigeria where modern psychiatric care was recently introduced to the population; and also (c) investigate if differences abound in the therapies which are administered to patients of various socio-economic backgrounds in these societies.