While the importance of psychological factors in attempted suicide has long been acknowledged, the use of standardized psychological techniques has been neglected. The paper by Vinoda (1966) is the first in Britain to describe the personality characteristics of attempted suicides using a battery of objective tests. She tested and compared a group of female attempted suicides, who had been admitted to the psychiatric ward of a general hospital, with a group of psychiatric patients and a group of non-psychiatric patients from the same hospital. Where differences on testing occurred it was usually the case that the attempted suicide and psychiatric groups were discriminated from the normal controls but not from each other.

Although there have been various studies of the treatment of schizophrenia and articles on it are numerous, hardly any work has been done on the subject in Pakistan.

The need for increased services for the treatment of alcoholism has been officially accepted and indeed emphasized in recent years (15, 20). The following evaluation of an Alcoholic Unit is based on the response to treatment over the course of one year shown by a cohort of 100 patients, half of whom were admitted to the Unit while the remainder were out-patients. The study aimed at describing the patients referred to the unit and at ascertaining what attributes of the patient and his treatment appeared to influence the prognosis.

Jenner, Gjessing, Cox, Davies-Jones, Hullin, and Hanna (1967) have presented some biochemical and clinical studies of a patient who showed a remarkably precisely timed manic-depressive psychosis. For the last eleven years the patient has been alternately depressed and lethargic for 24 hours, then elated for 24 hours, and so on almost without fail. Harding, Jeavons, Jenner, Drummond, Sheridan and Howells (1966) published electroencephalographic studies showing the 48-hour rhythm in the patient's electroencephalogram. The harmonic mean, the mean abundance and variability of the alpha rhythm all showed a striking 48-hour cycle. A number of similar patients have been described and are conveniently listed by Menninger-Lerchenthal (1960), Richter (1960), and Bunney and Hartmann (1965). Jenner (1965) made some suggestions about possibly heuristically helpful electronic analogues which might appropriately represent some of the underlying mechanisms of the 48-hour syndromes.

The psychogalvanic reflex (P.G.R.) is a decrease in the electrical resistance of the skin which occurs in response to a wide variety of stimuli.

The Coloured people of the Cape Peninsula have evolved over three hundred years as a demarcated ethnic group with recognizable physical features and characteristic cultural and social conditions. As such they constitute a very satisfactory population for epidemiological and transcultural studies, and when the need arose to plan for improved psychiatric services, a large-scale field survey of the prevalence and types of mental illness was set afoot. Since socio-economic circumstances appear to be very relevant to the amount and type of mental illness in a community, special estimations of these were also made. Random sampling of the entire population of Coloured persons over 20 years of age in the magisterial area of the Cape Peninsula was done and 500 of a total population of 200,365 people were interviewed about their mental and physical health, as well as a variety of economic and social circumstances, by a team of three psychiatrists and 14 specially trained social workers. In addition, interviews were held with reliable persons who knew each respondent, such as ministers of religion, social workers, housing managers, nurses, doctors, friends, relations, and employers. Hospital records were consulted as necessary, and the information was evaluated for each respondent by a team of three psychiatrists. The data were coded and finally exposed to an extensive computer and statistical analysis.

This paper reviews and reports on the frequencies of qualitative dermatoglyphic characters in schizophrenia. Dermatoglyphics is the name given by Cummins and Midlo (1943) to the study of the ridged skin found on the fingers, palms and soles. The biological value of dermatoglyphic investigation lies in the morphological constancy, from the time of formation until death, of the dermal ridge arrangements. The dermal ridges are fully formed by the fourteenth week of foetal development, therefore only genetic and prenatal environmental factors can influence ridge formation.

The aim of this study was to examine the factors leading to prolonged stay in hospital of patients admitted with mental disorder. It is part of a larger investigation on the interaction between the services provided for the same area by the psychiatric hospital and the psychiatric unit in the general hospital.

The study of a single case, though less conclusive, sometimes heralds methodological advance. Hopefully, other investigators will be able to replicate the findings on a large number of subjects. This report, based on the case history of Bob R., describes in detail how the Organic Integrity Test (OIT) may be used as a daily therapeutic index in the treatment of schizophrenia.

A patient, S., voiced the opinion that subnormals, the blind, anyone with physical or mental imperfections should be exterminated. This included the psychiatrically ill and consequently himself. He had attempted suicide, and said that when he thought it appropriate he would attempt suicide again. In projective tests and interviews he expressed the wish to kill his father, and showed much sado-sexual fantasy and racial prejudice. Psychological tests showed that he was of average intelligence, non-retarded and abnormally overinclusive. He was diagnosed initially as “paranoid schizophrenic”. Such bizarre and macabre features are not necessarily dangerous, but S. was married with two young children. He believed his children to be highly intelligent. Another baby was expected shortly. This study attempted to predict whether these attitudes were potentially dangerous should the patient discover some imperfection in his family.

The nutritional disturbance in anorexia nervosa almost invariably leads to striking physiological changes, which include amenorrhoea, bradycardia, hypotension and relative hypothermia with reversal of the usual diurnal temperature rhythm (Bliss and Branch, 1960; Mayer-Gross et al., 1960; Crisp and Roberts, 1962; Crisp, 1967a). Crisp (1965a, 1967a) has commented on the characteristic and excessive alertness, restlessness and insomnia displayed by anorexia nervosa patients, whom he regards as showing a specific type of malnutrition associated with carbohydrate starvation. Russell (1967) has also recently demonstrated that patients with this illness restrict especially their carbohydrate intake.

Longitudinal EEG studies in primary presenile dementia are conspicuously lacking (Kiloh and Osselton, 1966). Letemendia and Pampiglione (1958) found no changes, over a one year period, in the EEG patterns of several of their patients with Alzheimer's disease. Attention has recently been drawn to the relevance of duration of the particular illness when interpreting EEG data in primary presenile dementia (Gordon and Sim, 1967). The tendency to non-specificity of such data in this group of diseases underlines the importance of chronological variations in the EEGs, with regard to both differential diagnosis and prognosis.

Attention was first drawn to this syndrome by Kleine (1925), who described five patients with periodic somnolence, two of whom also had an excessive appetite. Levin (1929) described a youth aged 19 who had suffered from nine attacks of sleepiness and pathological hunger from the age of 16. The attacks lasted from one to six weeks and recurred at intervals of up to twenty-eight weeks, but he eventually recovered spontaneously.

All male patients above 180 cm. tall who were resident in the Århus State Hospital on 13 April, 1966, were registered: they numbered 42 out of the total of 440 resident males (8 · 1 per cent.). One patient, a 78-year-old man, died before chromosome analysis was made. Sex-chromatin analysis was made on Feulgenstained buccal smears and chromosome analysis was made on leucocyte cultures according to the method described by Moorhead et al. (1960), slightly modified. Not less than 25 metaphases were counted, at least 15 metaphases with the modal figure and all metaphases with a chromosome number deviating from the modal figures were analysed.

In the second half of the fourteenth century, the whole problem of poverty became in England for the first time a matter of government concern. The contractual relationship between landlord and villein which had prevailed during the Middle Ages, was breaking down, and the Black Death hastened this process. Statutes dealing with vagrancy and poverty were promulgated in 1349, 1351 and 1388: the able-bodied beggar was punished in the stocks and generally repression was the keynote, but despite harsh laws vagrancy increased. In a series of statutes from 1531–1601 the Tudor sovereigns initiated a system of local relief based on the Parish unit. In 1576, Houses of Correction were established:

Investigations of schizophrenia have shown that the presence or absence of primary paranoid delusions is correlated with differences in dealing with information from the environment (Venables, 1964; Silverman, 1964) which may well relate to stable personality characteristics. Claridge (1967) has recently proposed a psycho-physiological model in which it is hypothesized that paranoid schizophrenics are more sympathetically reactive, but show lower levels of cortical modulation of subcortical functions than non-paranoid schizophrenics. At the descriptive level of behaviour, this theory would predict greater emotionality (neuroticism) and extraversion in the former group, and this proposition was examined in a sample of psychiatric offenders. Since aggressive behaviour is prominent in this population, it was also predicted from Claridge's theory that the paranoids would more frequently have a history of aggressive behaviour and would show higher attitudinal hostility. However, since extreme (i.e. homicidal) aggression appears to occur in individuals who are not characteristically aggressive (Megargee, 1966), it was predicted that such offences would be more frequent among the non-paranoid schizophrenics.

Gilles de la Tourette's syndrome is an unusual condition with undetermined aetiology, treatment, and prognosis (1, 2, 3). Less than 50 case studies have been reported in the literature. This paper will present a detailed report of a case treated for 18 months, and brief summaries of two cases treated for three weeks.

Lippold and Redfearn (1964) described the mental changes induced by the passage of small polarizing currents between two electrodes attached above the eyebrows and a single electrode on the right knee. When the forehead electrodes were positive with a total current flow of the order of 500 microamps, the mental changes consisted of an elevation of mood and an increased involvement in the environment. Forehead negative electrodes produced withdrawal and quietness. These observations were made on a group of hospitalized patients, the majority of whom were, or had been, mildly depressed. The authors state that “all would probably have been considered quite ‘normal’ by non-medical observers”.

A previous paper (Morgan, 1967) demonstrated the extent to which long-stay psychiatric patients are handicapped by ignorance of the names of people whom they see daily. The mean performance of a sample of patients was less than half as good as that of a control group of non-patients. It was postulated that knowledge of another person's name is a useful tool in social intercourse, and that ignorance of a name represents a handicap to communication. It was further suggested that some cause and effect relationship exists between the social withdrawal of long-stay schizophrenic patients and their ignorance of names. The data presented in the previous paper did not serve to show whether this ignorance is treatable at all or whether current methods of treatment are in fact helping to treat it. The present paper aims to present some further evidence on these points, derived from a deliberate attempt to teach patients the names of other people.