A woman aged 20, first presenting with what appeared to be hysterical blindness as part of the syndrome of hysterical pseudo-dementia, soon showed the picture of speech-prompt catatonia, one of the subtypes of chronic schizophrenia described by Karl Leonhard. However, within a short time the neurological, EEG and laboratory findings indicated that the condition was one of subacute sclerosing panencephalitis.

While the phenomena described under the terms transitivism and appersonation are well known, they have not been studied in detail either from the descriptive or from the psychopathological standpoints. Here only a brief reference is made to the descriptive data. An account of the psychopathological hypotheses on which an explanation of the phenomena is based is followed by a discussion of the relevance of the clinical manifestations for a theory of psychosis.

The effect of sodium valproate, a drug which has been demonstrated to increase gamma-aminobutyric acid levels in the CNS, on tardive dyskinesia and psychiatric symptoms was investigated in a double-blind cross-over study on 32 chronic psychiatric patients. The oro-facial dyskinesias were totally or significantly relieved in 17 cases. During the active treatment period the involuntary movements of the extremities and dystonic spasms were also significantly relieved in 7 out of 9 patients. In two patients, however, the extrapyramidal symptoms became slightly worse. A significant improvement was noted in the psychiatric symptoms of 14 out of 32 patients during sodium valproate administration. The psychiatric state of 4 out of 32 patients deteriorated. There was no correlation between the serum concentration of sodium valproate and its effect on the dyskinesia or on the psychiatric symptoms. Some of the elderly subjects showed a slight accumulation of the drug.

One hundred and twenty-seven accidentally poisoned children from the emergency room of the Islamic Girls College, Cairo, were compared with an equal number of controls.

The highest age incidence for both sexes in poisoned children was 36 months. Males outnumbered females at a ratio of 3:2. Behavioural problems such as hyperactivity, temper tantrums, aggression, stubbornness, nocturnal enuresis and impulsiveness occurred more often in poisoned children than in controls and more often in those (24 patients) referred with accidental poisoning on more than one occasion. The families of poisoned children differed significantly from the controls in their large size, low level of education, disturbed home atmosphere and the accessibility to the child of the poisonous substance.

Various premorbid characteristics of a group of patients aged 50 or over suffering from paranoid psychoses (N = 54) were compared with those of patients of similar age suffering from affective psychoses (N = 57). (The diagnoses were those of the consultants.) The presence of deafness was investigated in the manner described by Cooper et al (1974). Using the discriminant function method, the diagnostic groups were highly significantly differentiated by six independent variables, which in combination predicted 40 per cent of the variance. These were: a ‘schizoid personality’ factor, the number of surviving children, precipitating events, deafness, family history and social class.

Anyone acquainted with Dr Thomas Szasz's previous writings about mental disorder, the nature of its relationship to the Law and to the problems of drug dependance (Szasz, 1961, 1963, 1970, 1972, 1975) has learned to look in the first instance for the dualism, the poles of which are to be demonstrated as irreconcilable. For, as Glazer (1965) has pointed out, one of Dr Szasz's main conceptual devices is ‘the dichotomy game‘. A phenomenon may belong to category (x) or another category (y) but not to both. As a first step it is as well to examine the definitions of the categories in question. They are liable to prove inconsistent or idiosyncratic or just to be omitted. In other cases, as Professor Stone (1973) has shown in his detailed and telling dissection of the tortuous and confused logic pursued by Dr Szasz in The Myth of Mental Illness, the definitions are incomplete or erroneous and the implied anti-thesis dubious or false. Beginning with the equation that a lie is to a mistake as malingering is to hysteria, Szasz manages, following a maze of tortuous and self-contradictory arguments, to emerge at the conclusion that it would be ‘… more accurate to regard hysteria as a lie than as a mistake‘.

Review of the literature concerning the relationship between deafness and psychiatric disorder reveals differences in the pattern of illness depending on the severity of deafness and the age of onset. In particular, the prevalence of schizophrenia in the prelingually deaf is similar to that found in the normal population, whereas the hard of hearing are over-represented among samples of patients suffering from paranoid psychoses in later life.

Possible modes of action of long-standing hearing loss in the aetiology of paranoid illnesses are considered: the psychological and social consequences of deafness, the possible contribution of sensory deprivation phenomena, and the interference of hearing loss in attention, perception and communication. Finally, possible future lines of research are suggested.

This study compared matched groups of patients with acute schizophrenia and with depression on three tests used in the assessment of schizophrenic thinking disorder. Most measures derived from these tests significantly differentiated the groups; however, within the schizophrenic group there were no significant correlations between scores on the three tests. Further data were available from a choice reaction-time card-sorting task, from which estimates of distractability, stimulus decision time, response decision time, and movement time, were obtained. Only one significant relation was found between these measures and scores on the clinical tests. The possible confounding effects of intelligence and responsiveness are discussed. It is argued that more direct measures of the latter are preferable to interpreting tests of thinking disorder in terms of information processing deficits.

In A Treatise of the Hypochondriack and Hysterick Passions published in 1711, Bernard Mandeville, writing by way of ‘Information to Patients’ describes three dialogues between an imaginary physician, Philoperio, and his patient, a confirmed hypochondriac, Misomedion. The book is original in its conception inasmuch as it represents an early recorded conversation between a physician and his patient. As such it represents a development in the writing on therapeutic technique of the eighteenth century. Though Mandeville's originality has been emphasized by contemporary medical historians, this book seems to have had little influence on the therapeutic style of the physicians of his day.