Construction and curation of a data set of historical mental health incidence in Norway

Blinkova, A. O., Khakurel, U., Gaddy, H. G. ORCID: 0000-0001-6397-4679, Mamelund, S.-E. and Bekker-Nielsen Dunbar, M. (2025) Construction and curation of a data set of historical mental health incidence in Norway. Scientific Data, 12 (1). ISSN 2052-4463

Text - Published Version Available under License Creative Commons Attribution. Download (3MB)

Abstract

We present a structured data set allowing opportunity for insights into mental health admissions to Norwegian facilities covering the period 1872 to 1929. This resource enables quantitative analysis of historical mental health trends across multiple decades and may provide a deeper understanding of the burden of post-viral mental health conditions, which are of renewed interest following the coronavirus disease pandemic of the early twenty-first century. Our data set includes records from 29 facilities, comprising council, private, incarceration, state, and hospital facilities. To construct and curate our data set, we used optical character recognition using ABBYY Finereader to extract tables from historical reports. It was followed by manual validation, harmonization of facility names, and mapping of historical diagnostic terms to Bertillon’s classification of causes. In addition, sex and geography were incorporated as explanatory variables. We believe our data set offers a foundation for comparative historical studies and will contribute additional evidence to understanding long-term mental health patterns.

Item Type:	Article
Additional Information:	© 2025 The Author(s)
Divisions:	Economic History
Subjects:	R Medicine > RA Public aspects of medicine
Date Deposited:	01 Sep 2025 10:24
Last Modified:	01 Sep 2025 11:57
URI:	http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/id/eprint/129336

Actions (login required)

View Item