A new series of compounds thought to have some of the properties of major tranquillizers has recently been synthesized (Archer et al., 1962). One of these, oxypertine (Fig. 1) has been made available to us under its code name, WIN.18, 501. Pharmacological studies have shown oxypertine to have tranquillizing, anti-adrenergic and hypotensive properties (Wylie and Archer, 1962).

My purpose in this article is to draw attention to certain statistical features of manic depressive psychosis and to inquire into their possible aetiological significance.

I shall show that some of these statistical characteristics are very similar to comparable aspects of diseases that are widely considered to be autoimmune. Although it does not follow than manic depressive psychosis is an auto immune disorder, the parallels and coincidences are perhaps sufficiently striking to warrant further investigation.

There is a general impression amongst doctors that students and ex-students of Psychology suffer more from psychiatric disorders than do the rest of the population. This impression has not, however, been backed by any figures so far as I can discover. Davidson et al. (1955), for example, in their study of the detection of psychological vulnerability in students, make no special mention of Psychology students. Nor is there any special mention of Psychology students in the Proceedings of the First International Conference on Student Mental Health, edited by Funkenstein (1959). This present paper is an attempt to remedy the deficiency in part, and to encourage others to collect and publish further data.

Family psychiatry has the primary aim of studying the inter-relationship of mental health and disorder within families and using this knowledge in the treatment and prophylaxis of mental illness in the different family members.

This paper reports the result of an investigation into the hypothesis that severity of personality disturbance is positively related to the frequency of certain early adverse childhood influences.

Although the number of anti-depressant drugs available has grown rapidly in recent years, they are still broadly classified into three main groups. First are the general nervous system stimulants, exemplified by amphetamine, second the group derived from the phenothiazines exemplified by imipramine and third, the monoamineoxidase inhibitors—the first example of which was iproniazid. The general stimulants have many disadvantages, their place in treatment is limited, but fairly well defined. Many monoamineoxidase inhibitors have been found to have serious toxic effects, but some, including tranylcypromine appear to be reasonably safe and effective (Agin, 1960).

In the previous paper (Burch, 1964), I discussed the possible significance of certain statistical features of manic depressive psychosis; in this one I shall consider corresponding statistics relating to schizophrenia.

Despite the advent of the stimulant phenothiazines—effective, sometimes, when older dimethyl compounds fail—a proportion of chronic schizophrenics continue to resist treatment with both types of drug, and also fail to respond to intensive nursing regimes designed to combat the effects of institutionalization. These patients constitute a major therapeutic problem.

Attempted suicide has been described as “one of the most disturbing and costly abnormal behaviour patterns in our society” (29). Various suspected predisposing factors have been extensively studied, including physical and mental illness (e.g. 24, 17, 11, 25, 6), alcoholism (e.g. 19, 8, 3, 12), interpersonal conflicts (e.g. 10, 30, 14), old age (e.g. 15, 34, 23), and social isolation and degeneration (e.g. 7, 28, 33).

Haloperidol is a drug that fulfils Delay's criteria of a neuroleptic in that:

1. 1. It inhibits psychomotor agitation without producing sleep.

2. 2. Alleviates psychomotor manifestations.

3. 3. Produces with increasing dosage characteristic extrapyramidal signs.

This study was undertaken to learn more about a group of patients, married women, who had become housebound by their phobic anxiety symptoms. It was felt that it would be of some value to discover to what extent they formed a homogeneous group, what the outcome of their illness was in general terms, and specifically what proportion remained housebound and what data there had been available on admission to hospital that might in retrospect be seen to have had prognostic significance.

Common observation indicates that some chronic schizophrenics are more extraverted than others. According to Eysenck (1960, p. 11) neuroticism is a distinct factor from psychoticism; one would therefore expect it to manifest itself to a varying extent in different chronic schizophrenics. These considerations suggested that it would be of interest to discover whether extraversion and neuroticism in a sample of chronic schizophrenics, as measured by their extraversion and neuroticism scores on the Eysenck Personality Inventory (Eysenck and Eysenck, 1963), a modified form of the Maudsley Personality Inventory (Eysenck, 1956), were significantly related to their psychiatric symptoms and to other characteristics such as sex, age and work efficiency.

The conjunction of hypothyroidism and mental illness has been of great interest to psychiatrists for almost a century. Sir William Gull (1873) noted mental changes in his original description of hypothyroidism, as did Ord (1878) when he coined the term myxoedema. Savage (1880) reported the first patient with myxoedema to be found in a mental hospital population.