The Welsh Division became a formal entity in September, 1972 with the election of Officers and an Executive Committee. The discussions preceding the setting up of the Divisional machinery were greatly facilitated by the fact that already a very high proportion of psychiatrists in Wales were members of the Welsh Psychiatric Society. This group had already been meeting for two weekends and two single day meetings every year since 1960 with a judicious mixture of clinical lectures and social activities. Discussions therefore centred less on how psychiatrists could be brought together than on how the new Division could be brought into being without losing the benefits of the Welsh Psychiatric Society with its enthusiastic supporters, financial assets and freedom of action and membership. In practice this appears to be working out well and the two organizations continue to flourish symbiotically. The Welsh Division has taken over the organization of some of the clinical meetings and the political functions, and the W.P.S. continues to arrange weekend clinical meetings and to permit a wider link up of professional people interested in psychiatry by its more open membership. The Society has also recently offered an annual prize in psychiatry to students of the Welsh National School of Medicine.

In 21 widows and 46 amputees a psychological reaction to loss designated as ‘grief’ was commonly reported. This included an initial period of numbness, soon followed by restless pining with preoccupation with thoughts of the loss, a clear visual memory of the lost object and a sense of its presence. Defensive processes, reflected in difficulty in believing in the loss and avoidance of reminders, were also evident.

Widows differed from amputees in showing more evidence of overt distress in the early post-loss phase, but whereas these features diminished in prevalence in the course of the next year the equivalent features reported by the amputee group remained virtually unchanged.

The Maudsley Personality Inventory and the Beck Depression Inventory, with additional items to assess depressive functional shift features and outlook on life values, were administered to 100 patients diagnosed as suffering from depressive illness. Patients’ scores for questions eliciting information about symptoms assumed to be dependent on personality correlated at substantial and significant levels with N scale scores of the Maudsley Personality Inventory. Similar levels of correlation were found for the added items for assessing life values. Items believed to assess changes in functions independent of personality, such as the features of the Depressive Functional Shift, showed no correlation with either N or E scales of the Maudsley Personality Inventory, while demonstrating a substantial level of correlation with the depression scale. It is concluded that whereas changes in innate biological functions independent of environment are direct indications of the depressive illness process, psychological symptoms of the illness may reflect changes in personality dependent on upbringing, education and cultural background, thereby producing greater variation in this group of psychological symptoms.

Serum copper concentrations were determined by atomic absorption spectrophotometry in 102 schizophrenic patients and 95 healthy control subjects. The serum copper concentrations were significantly higher in the schizophrenic patients than in the normal control subjects. The average serum copper in schizophrenic females was higher than in schizophrenic males, but the difference was not statistically significant

Only Scandinavian investigators have reported on demographic aspects of reactive psychoses. Data from the National Health Service, Denmark, for age at first admission, sex, and length of stay in hospital in reactive, manic-depressive and schizophrenic psychoses are analysed. Differences in sex incidence ratios, age at first admission and length of stay are evident between the three psychoses. The differences noted are considered to provide indirect evidence supporting the separate diagnostic categories.

Twenty-six psychotic children were examined by means of psychological tests and EEGs. The parents of these patients were also tested with the EPI and the Grid Test of Thought Disorder. The mothers of children with the symptom of autism tended to have some cognitive disorganization, which was less common in the mothers of children without the symptom. The extraversion and neuroticism scores of all parents were not markedly different from population statistics.

The incidence of EEG abnormality in the children was high and not related to diagnosis or other criteria.

These findings are interpreted as providing suggestive evidence for a two-factor theory of childhood psychosis. It is postulated that a neurological disorder is a necessary condition for the development of such a disorder; and that a second process related to parental characteristics is also involved, which has the effect of determining the particular symptomatic manifestations seen in the psychotic child.

A pair of MZ male twins concordant for early infantile autism (E.I.A.) is presented. A distinction is drawn between E.I.A. and infantile psychosis (I.P.) with associated mental retardation as a guide to prognosis and the necessity to provide suitable social training and education. The relevance of aetiology is discussed, and the importance of abnormal ante-natal history and delivery status, even in cases with strong genetic predisposition, is noted.

Hysteria (Briquet's Syndrome) and sociopathy cluster in the same families instead of segregating as independent traits. Assortative mating between hysterics and sociopaths increases the observed similarity between relatives, but the familial association between sociopathy and hysteria remains after taking assortative mating into account. The Multifactorial Model of Disease Transmission with three thresholds related to severity and sex accounts for population and family data about sociopathic men, sociopathic women, and women with hysteria. The data were obtained for 227 first-degree relatives and for 800 subjects in the general population.

Depending on the sex of the individual and its severity, the same aetiological process may lead to different, sometimes overlapping, clinical pictures. Specifically, analysis indicates that hysteria in women is a more prevalent and less deviant manifestation of the same process that causes sociopathy in women.

Some conceptual problems in relation to the interaction of genetic influence and social disadvantagement are discussed, and some of the results of a study of 144 families with mentally handicapped children reported. The work of Heber and his associates in Milwaukee is briefly reviewed, and the Edinburgh data discussed in relation to the study in Aberdeen by Birch et al. (1970). Possible strategies for intervention are considered.

Sixty-four per cent of 874 freshmen and sophomore women sent questionnaires about premenstrual and menstrual symptoms returned them. They differed from those not returning the questionnaires only in year of school. As predicted, women reporting premenstrual affective symptoms were more likely than those who did not report them to seek psychiatric care at the Student Health Service and to be diagnosed as affective disorder at the service.