Introduction: Schizophrenia is one of the most severe mental disorders and still demands profoundstudies. There are other important mental disorders with epidemiological significance, including mood or affectivedisorders and disorders associated to abuse of alcohol and psychoactive substances. In Roraima, these disordersare an important public health issue.Objectives: The study’s objective is to characterize the epidemiology of schizophrenia and other significant mental, behavior and affection disorders in Roraima, Brazil.Methods: The study was a literature review about the theme composed by articles from the databases SCIELO and PUBMED, and an epidemiological research of the cases in Roraima from January 2014 through February 2018 from the brazilian ́s health ministry online database named “Departamento de Informática do Sistema Único de Saúde(DATASUS)”.Results and Discussion: From January 2014 throughFebruary 2018, 1.030 cases of schizophrenia, affective disorders and disorders related to alcohol or psychoactive substances abuse occurred inRoraima. The highest prevalence is schizophrenia, with 463 cases, and the lower prevalence is mental and behavioral disorders related to alcohol abuse with 79 cases.About 62.52% of the patients are male and 37.47% are female. When analyzed by the patients’ races, statistics showed that 76.39% of the men are brown-skinned, 1.86% are white-skinned and the lowest prevalence are black-skinned and indigenous, both with 1.08%. About 19.56% of men do not have a definedskin color/race in the system. Among the women, the majority of patients were also brown-skinned with 69.68%, followed by indigenous (3.88%), white-skinned (3.36%) and black-skinned (0.51%). There was a lower prevalence among the yellow-skinned with 0.25% and 22.27% of the women did not have their color skin/race defined in the system. About 2.1% of the total number of cases analyzed in this study are indigenous patients, an important segment of Roraima ́s population. When analyzed by the patients’ age, the higher prevalence of schizophrenia and other mental, behavior and affection disorders is the age between 20 and 39 years old (48.15%), followed by the age between 40 and 59 years old (18.44%), between 10 and 19 years (16,40%) and between 1 and 9 years old (13,49%). Finally, the lower prevalence is the age between 60 and 79 years old (2,81%).
Conclusion: Based on the statistics, new public health policiesare necessary for better diagnoses, control and treatment of these mental disorders. In addition, it stands out the importance of public health databases with epidemiological information as useful resources to guide future policies and studies.
