INTRODUCTION: Along the 20th century, women underwent numerous changes and reached a more active participation in society. This study aims at describing the profile of the female patients admitted to a service of psychiatric hospitalization from May 1931 to December 2000. In addition, it relates the profile of psychiatric morbidity with the historical, social and demographic changes. It also offers a comparison between the epidemiological conditions throughout the historical series and the aspects regarding the environment and the sociocultural status of women from a Southern Brazilian state. MATERIALS AND METHODS: Descriptive, longitudinal, epidemiological study including historical data and based on data collected from the medical files and statistics of a hospital. The following variables were assessed: age, marital status, race, professional area, occupation, social class and psychiatric diagnosis, all standardized according to the International Classification of Diseases (ICD-9 and ICD-10) criteria. To identify the cases, all first hospitalizations of women were used. RESULTS: Along 70 years, a total of 9,629 individuals/cases was obtained. There was a predominance of women in the age group between 26-45 years (47.9%), white (91.3%), belonging to the subproletariat (86.8%), not belonging to the economically active part of the population (96.7%) and with diagnosis of affective disorders (28.6%) and schizophrenic psychoses (25.2%). With regard to marital status, married women were prevalent (44.9%). However, in the 1990's, single women represented 54.4%, whereas married women accounted for 39.7% of the patients. CONCLUSION: Significant changes were detected in the reasons for admitting women to psychiatric services over the past years. It is suggested that the variations might have been influenced by biological determinants of severe mental diseases, and especially by the social pressure resulting from the new role of women in society.
Mental health; women's health; epidemiological studies; epidemiology; descriptive epidemiology; medical care statistics; hospital statistics; psychiatry
