During the course of a recent analysis of one year's male admissions to Rampton Hospital, and of male referrals to the psychology department, attempts were made to distinguish various offence patterns by means of psychological laboratory techniques. The results were largely disappointing, owing mainly to the great amount of overlap in the numerous crimes committed by the same patients. However, using a galvanic skin response (G.S.R.) conditioning procedure similar to that described by Tong (1958), it was noted that those patients who had committed arson revealed a normal distribution of conditioned responses (see Table I), whereas every other offence pattern was positively skewed towards the low condition-ability end of the dimension (Esher, Orme, McKerracher, 1965). This suggested that further differentiation might be possible, and a full analysis was made of a number of case history factors in those patients who had, amongst other crimes, been charged with and found guilty of, committing arson. Comparison was made with the remaining patients, guilty of other crimes but not of arson.

In the study of mental diseases and their treatment physical activity seems to be an important variable. In order to get an objective recording of physical activity, we have applied two methods. In this study we wish to show how a normal group behaves under different circumstances concerning these two measures of activity, and we also report a pilot study in which the two methods were applied to a group of patients with mental diseases.

There has been much speculation but little evidence concerning the view that personality characteristics, like cognitive factors, change with age. Consequently, the lack of information on the MMPI for aged populations may well have led to its inadvertent misuse on the assumption that the standard normative data given in the revised Manual (Hathaway and McKinley, 1951) are applicable to the elderly. The authors present data on a sample of the aged taken from the community which shows this assumption to be misleading, and attempt to improve this situation.

During the past ten years much attention has been paid to the question of chronicity in mental hospital patients. At the same time there has been a trend towards establishing units (often attached to general hospitals) for short-stay in-patient and possibly day-patient care. In these units, where the emphasis is on outpatient treatment, it is soon apparent to the psychiatrists staffing them that they, too, have to cope with a population of chronic patients. They tend, however, to be outpatients rather than in-patients, and are probably better described as “long-term”. Heasman (1962) gave a graphic description of this problem in the non-psychiatric outpatient department and compared it to that of the “institutional neurosis” as described by Barton (1959). The purpose of this paper is to describe the situation in a Teaching Hospital Department of Psychiatry attached to a general hospital.

There have been only a few investigations into the seasonal prevalence of neurosis. Stocks (1949) found in a morbidity survey by interview the lowest prevalence of “nervous complaints” in July and August and the highest in October and November. Smiley, Buck, Anderson and Hobbs (1954) in Canada found that there was a higher number of insured claiming benefit for “mental illness” in January than in July. McCartney (1962) in private psychiatric practice in New York found that there was a seasonal variation in the number of referrals of various types of neurotic reactions. The purpose of this investigation was to examine the seasonal variation in attendances with symptoms of psychiatric ill health in a general practice and compare this with the seasonal variations of attendances due to physical illness.

Since 1932 the amylobarbitone (amobarbital sodium, Amytal) interview has been used as a technique for diagnostic evaluation of patients with psychiatric illnesses (Lindemann, 1932). Amytal has also been used to make mute patients talk, as a sedative, a mood elevator, and as an agent in various other types of psychiatric treatment such as sleep therapy, abreaction, narcoanalysis (Horsley, 1936), narcosynthesis (Grinker et al., 1945), narcosuggestion, and narcoplexis (Brickner et al., 1950).

During a study of schizophrenic patients under prolonged treatment with reserpine alternating with placebo, night and day portions of urine were sampled for the determination of 4.-hydroxy-3-methoxymandelic acid (VMA). We found that reserpine treatment caused a moderate decrease in the excretion of this metabolite of adrenaline and noradrenaline, as reported in detail elsewhere (Munkvad and Randrup). We also observed certain characteristic changes in urine volume and diurnal rhythm, and these changes will be reported on in the present paper.

It has long been recognized that deprivation in childhood could be related to subsequent crime. Bunyan, in The Life and Death of Mr. Badman, takes for granted that orphanhood renders a girl liable to early seduction. Dickens, writing of Newgate Prison in his Sketches by Boz, says: “Barely past her childhood, it required but a glance to discover that she was one of those children, born and bred in neglect and vice, who had never known what childhood is; who have never been taught to love and court a parent's smile, or to dread a parent's frown. The thousand nameless endearments of childhood, its gaiety and its innocence, are alike unknown to them. They have entered at once into the stern realities and miseries of life, and to their better nature it is almost impossible to appeal in after times ….” In 1944, Bowlby outlined the concept of the affectless and affectionless psychopath produced by deprivation and repeated change of parent figure. The Gluecks, in 1950, found an increase of incidence of broken family in young male delinquents. Analysis of their figures (Fig. 1) suggests that loss of mothers in the childhood of these male delinquents was significant. In 1961 we made an examination of 200 women prisoners and concluded that loss of fathers in childhood was a significant factor in female delinquents.

Since the introduction of the WAIS many short forms have been proposed, but specific problems associated with the assessment of the aged have not been factors influencing their development. The measurement of cognitive functioning in persons over 65 presents the clinician with many difficulties, not least of which is a consideration of time.

The anticonvulsants now in general use have made epilepsy among the mentally subnormal no longer the problem it was. However, the treatment of long standing epilepsy associated with behaviour problems or personality disorders in the so-called temporal lobe syndrome still remains a challenge. Surgical intervention seldom has a place in cases with severe and diffuse brain damage complicated by subnormal intellectual functioning, frequent seizures and personality changes.

The deleterious effects of barbiturates on the vulnerable addictive personality have been well recognized for some years. The first warning came as far back as sixty-one years ago (Clarke, 1904) only a year after the introduction of the first barbiturate drug. Goodman and Gilman (1956) state that habituation to the barbiturates in the sense of psychic dependence is not infrequent, and point out the important fact that most persons addicted to barbiturates have some basic character disorder or psychoneurosis. These authors even go on to say that barbiturate addiction is a more serious public health and mental health problem than morphine addiction because it produces greater mental, emotional and neurological impairment, and because withdrawal entails real hazards.

The accidental event of childhood bereavement by death of a parent, and its possible importance in the later development of psychiatric illness, has been under study in recent years. It is a truism to state that, in the present organization of European society, such an event is a catastrophe, but whether bereavement is an event of aetiological importance in mental illness has not yet been decided.

The association of physical illness and psychiatric illness has been found by Doust (1952), Downes and Simon (1953), Hinkle and Woolf (1957) and others.

The present investigation was conducted in a general practice; the aim was to assess whether a physical illness could precipitate psychiatric ill health. The conditions in general practice appeared to be suitable for this investigation because patients can be observed before and after a physical illness.

While a study of schizophrenia and social class (Goldberg and Morrison, 1963) was in progress, it became obvious that some problems of hospital and community care among young male mental hospital patients should be pursued. Accordingly, it was decided to extend the project to a systematic follow up of the patients admitted to one of the two hospitals included in the study. This paper reports the findings in two parts; Part I relates length of stay in hospital to the severity of a patient's illness and to his circumstances before and after leaving hospital; Part II relates the patient's post-hospital work performance to certain other factors.

Psychiatric research has long been hampered by lack of sophisticated measures of clinical events. The semantic differential is therefore a welcome new tool in the psychiatric kitbag. It was developed by Osgood and his associates (1957), and can essentially be regarded as a limited association technique which readily taps aspects of meaning and attitude. It is adaptable to a great variety of problems, while remaining easy to give and score. Provided one wishes to measure meaning or attitude, and can link one's hypotheses tightly to the outcome of scores on certain concepts and scales, the technique can be extremely valuable. In order to contrast psychiatric disorders one can build up different patterns of meaning for each disorder on concepts crucial to the theories being tested. We can thus obtain a kind of semantic geography for a small region of function which aids our understanding of the disorder in question.