Reports of deliberate self-harm (DSH) are rare from Pakistan where psychotropic drugs can be obtained ‘over the counter’. A retrospective analysis of 302 index cases presenting to a university hospital in Karachi showed self-poisoning with benzodiazepines as the most common method, followed by organophosphate insecticides. Salicylates and non-opiate analgesics were significantly absent from our series. Implications of these findings are discussed.

From a group meeting in one room at Friern Hospital, the annual conferences of TAPS (Team for the Assessment of Psychiatric Services) have grown after ten years to overflowing a large hall, with participants from many countries. Dr Rachel Jenkins of the Department of Health, in introducing the meeting, emphasised that mental illness now had a central place in national health targets. The reduction of suicide was a special objective, particularly as it is now estimated that one in six of the severely mentally ill eventually kill themselves. She pointed out that although this conference was focused on deinstitutionalisation, there had been very little research on why such major national differences in this process had occurred.

The inaugural meeting of a Special Interest Group for Neuroscience in Psychiatry was held at the meeting of the College in Glasgow in 1995, chaired by Professor Stuart Checkley.

The following statement has been prepared for the group to announce its existence and stimulate discussion of its aims.

Academic psychiatry at Keele University reached its 10th birthday in 1996. In 1986 John Cox was appointed to the foundation Chair of Psychiatry in what was then the Department of Postgraduate Medicine (Cox, 1990; Barrett, 1991). The School of Postgraduate Medicine was established in 1989 and along with it a formal Department of Psychiatry. There is no undergraduate medical school at Keele and the School of Postgraduate Medicine, with 14 full Professorships, is now the largest in the United Kingdom, outside of London. The Department of Psychiatry has expanded in size since 1989 and has one Professor of Psychiatry, four Senior Lecturers and two Lecturers. With its busy MRCPsych teaching programme, a Diploma and MSc in General Psychiatry and research activity it has made a significant contribution to the raising of the standards of North Staffordshire psychiatry. From its small beginnings it has now attained a national and international profile.

John Collee, in his column in The Observer, said that a febrile illness should be compulsory for every doctor, as it reminds one of what being a patient is like. Having been ill recently myself, I can only endorse this view. I rather overdid it in that I acquired a severe head injury which resulted in admission to hospital for six months. As a psychiatrist with a head injury I found myself in a near unique position in that I not only had the experience of being a patient but can now understand some of the psychological processes of recovering from a head injury. Although neuropsychiatry was a field I was interested in, I would not have chosen this method of investigating it!

This Conference, organised by the Association for Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy in the NHS, brought to the St Charles Day Hospital psychoanalysts and workers from different disciplines within NHS old age psychiatry services. Over 70 delegates attended, bringing varying experience of dynamic work.

By describing a conjoint job-share in a single registrar post on an acute adult psychiatric ward in Wellington, New Zealand, this paper contributes to the growing literature on the subject of part-time training. We shared, on the one hand a registrar post and, on the other hand, our domestic life and the raising of our first child. We supplement our subjective impressions with information gathered from the multidisciplinary team, using a short

Short paper presentations are now a major feature of most medical conferences. While the exact timing varies it is not unusual to have only 10–15 minutes to present the results of research which may have taken years to plan, collect and analyse. Many doctors have not had any training in teaching or presentational skills, a fact which becomes readily apparent to those who have to hear them present at conferences.

There have been two recent accounts in the Psychiatric Bulletin (Harrison, 1989; Kisely, 1993) which have given some practical advice about getting work in Australia. They did, however, rather gloss over the details. With clear memories of the difficulties of arranging a one year training post in Sydney, New South Wales (NSW) and having been approached by numerous mainly junior colleagues asking about details of arranging a similar trip, I am writing what I hope will be a useful and accurate “Getting your Australian visa and medical registration made easy” guide.

The West Suffolk Strategy to Combat Alcohol Misuse and the first edition of the Good Beer Guide to Belgium and Holland hit the streets on the same day. More importantly the press releases hit the newsdesks of the regional media by the same post. Fortunately, alcohol is entertainment and alcoholism is public affairs so none of the news editors twigged that the two publications had the same author.

The present trend towards community care with the continuing closure of the old Victorian institutions has given rise to much argument for and against community care. Incidents of violence by mentally ill patients against members of the public have resulted in some backlash against community care. There are fears of a return to the days of the institution. It is proposed that these changes can be predicted from a model that we have called the ‘spiral model’. An understanding of this model might help to prevent history from repeating itself.

This paper presents the coping strategies developed by one patient with 18 years experience of managing her own schizophrenic illness. The interventions which evolved gave her significant control over her illness. We report her experiences and emphasise that for some patients with treatment resistant schizophrenia, the patients themselves may have expertise in managing their symptoms.