Construction and curation of a dataset of historical mental health incidence in Norway

This dataset contains historical records of mental health admissions to Norwegian mental health facilities from 1872 to 1929. The data was extracted from archival government reports using OCR (ABBY FineReader), cleaned, and harmonized to enable quantitative research into historical mental illness, public health, and post-viral mental health conditions.

Admissions are stratified by year, biological sex, facility, and reported cause. Causes were harmonized using the Bertillon Classification of Causes of Death, and facility locations were assigned using the modern NUTS statistical regions. This dataset may support research on long-term mental health trends, historical epidemiology, or comparisons to contemporary mental health data. 

The deposit includes both raw OCR outputs and the cleaned dataset, along with classification mappings, metadata, R scripts and documentation to ensure transparency and reproducibility.

The data are currently under embargo. The first version will be publicly available one year after the article is published. Researchers may request access during the embargo period.