Indecent exposure is the second commonest sexual offence in England and Wales. The offenders responsible usually fall into the clinical group known as exhibitionists. Exhibitionism is one of the less well understood sexual disorders, and is virtually confined to males. It is characterized by the urge to expose the genitals to members of the opposite sex in a more or less public situation.

The sexual asphyxias have, in the past, often been described by forensic pathologists after an apparently accidental death has brought the condition to light. The following case is exceptional in that it came to light before a fatality occurred and suggests that intense self-punitive tendencies may play a part in some cases.

The growing adoption (1) of unilateral non-dominant ECT in place of the classical bilateral technique requires the accurate identification of the dominant hemisphere; the following simple method appears to be an improvement on those previously described (2) (3).

The Society of Biological Psychiatry is offering two awards—one in basic and one in clinical science—for the purpose of stimulating research in biological psychiatry by ‘young investigators’.

(1) These awards of $750 each for the two best research papers were made possible by the A. E. Bennett Neuropsychiatric Research Foundation. They are to be given to candidates who shall not have passed their thirty-fifth birthday in April 1973. (2) Although research is not to be judged in comparison with the work of more mature or experienced investigators, special consideration shall be given to the independence of thought and originality of the investigation. (3) The candidate must be actively engaged in the research for which the award is sought. (4) The papers submitted to Awards Committee should describe work which has recently been finished but not published. The Society's journal, Biological Psychiatry, shall be given first rights to publication of the award winning papers. (5) The recipients will be invited to read their papers at the Society's annual convention which will be held in Montreal, 8-10 June 1973. Formal presentation of the honoraria shall be made in person at the Society's banquet.

In the Suggested Reading List (Books) on Mental Subnormality (July News and Notes, page 11), the address of the publisher of the Second International Congress of the International Association for the Scientific Study of Mental Deficiency, 1970 (ed. David A. Primrose) should have been: Swetz and Zeitlinger, N.V., Amsterdam, Holland.

The production of a catatonic-like state in animals by phenothiazines and related compounds (‘experimental catatonia’) is an important laboratory test in the assessment of neuroleptics (Joyce, 1968). This response is, however, uncommon in humans who are receiving therapeutic doses of this type of drug. Such a case is described, and some of the literature concerning this subject is reviewed.

This study has arisen out of the work of the Newcastle group (Kiloh and Garside, 1963; Kay et al., 1969) and that of the London group (Kendell, 1968) on the forms of depressive illness. In the present investigation, unlike those mentioned, a subjective approach was employed; that is, what the patients actually reported about themselves rather than a psychiatric appraisal of the patient was used as the data. A similar approach was employed by Pilowsky, Levine and Boulton (1969) in their taxonomic study of depression. The object of this paper is firstly, to investigate the systematic and the taxonomy of depressive phenomena; secondly to look at this taxonomy in depressive illness and non-depressive illness patients; and thirdly to investigate the psychiatrist's notion of the endogenous-reactive dichotomy within this taxonomy. Essentially the question is whether there is a continuum of depression, at one pole being reactive depression and at the other pole endogenous depression or whether these two classical diagnoses represent separate empirical entities. The former view is taken by the London workers and the latter by the Newcastle workers. In a recent review article, Eysenck (1970) favoured the binary or separate entity model, although he suggests that both views of depressive illness are over simplistic in their formulations.

Delusions of poisoning often dominate the clinical picture in schizophrenia. In an earlier publication (6) we have suggested that these cases may be phenomenologically distinct from other schizophrenics. Patients who believed they were poisoned or gassed reported more somatic symptoms, headaches, decreased visual acuity and disturbances of taste and smell.