[Epidemiologic analysis of a contingent of patients with psychoses who applied for emergency psychiatric services in Ethiopia].

A clinico-statistical analysis covers 825 psychotic patients who applied to the Amanuel mental hospital in Addis-Abeba over the first 3 months of 1983. The population of patients had the following characteristics associated with cultural factors: a considerable predominance of males, a dramatic reduction in the number of both male and female patients with an increasing distance between their place of residence and the hospital, a large percentage of non-working individuals, single men and divorced women. Among the entire number of mental patients primary patients constituted 67.1%; 42.9% of all patients were hospitalized. A total of 6.7% of patients could not be hospitalized because of overcrowding in the hospital. As regards diagnoses, the patients were distributed in the following way: schizophrenia 46.1%, reactive psychoses 19%, intoxicational 15.6%, organic 3.9%, involutional 2.8%, senile 2.5%, epileptic 2.3%, manic-depressive 2.1%, unspecified psychoses 4.8%. The identified characteristics of the local psychopathology in Ethiopia are discussed.