Denmark has national healthcare. As a consequence of this, they have health records on their entire population dating back decades. This makes Denmark an ideal setting for conducting epidemiologic research. Psychiatric epidemiology deals with the distribution and determinants of psychiatric disorders and related events in populations. Jaimie L. Gradus, DSc, MPH, provides a brief overview of the field of psychiatric epidemiology, a discussion of the strengths of using Danish data, as well as relevance of the results to the US population.
**Jaimie L. Gradus** is an Epidemiologist at the Women’s Health Sciences Division of the National Center for PTSD, and an Assistant Professor of Psychiatry and Epidemiology at Boston University School of Medicine and School of Public Health. She received her BA in psychology from Stony Brook University, and then her M.P.H. with a concentration in epidemiology and biostatistics and D.Sc. in epidemiology at Boston University. Dr. Gradus's research interests are in the epidemiology of trauma and trauma-related disorders, with a particular focus on suicide outcomes. She was the winner of the 2009 Lilienfeld Prize from the Society for Epidemiologic Research for her paper on the association between PTSD and death from suicide in the population of Denmark. Dr. Gradus has been the recipient of multiple National Institute of Mental Health and foundation grants to conduct epidemiologic research in both veterans and the general population.