This paper examines the experience and motivation of junior doctors who successfully published in the Psychiatric Bulletin and The British Journal of Psychiatry, over a four month period. Most articles took over a year from first involvement to successful publication, although this varied according to the type of article. While having published is recognised to increase the likelihood of appointment to registrar and senior registrar posts, interest in the subject is frequently cited as a more important reason to publish among authors than enhancement of their curriculum vitae.

This text discusses whether senior trainees should endeavour to Join a College Approval Panel as one of the visiting team, what the advantages would be to the trainees being visited of having a senior trainee representative as a member of the assessing group and what the benefits are to senior trainees in terms of training and broadening their own curriculum vitae.

The Psychiatric Bulletin offers the post of a trainee editor on its Editorial Board, open to all trainees in psychiatry. In this paper we (the immediate past and current Trainee Editor) describe the roles and responsibilities, learning opportunities and our own experiences from our time as Trainee Editor of the Bulletin. We hope we will give readers some understanding of the immense learning potential and academic exposure that this post offers, and encourage trainees to consider whether it is of interest to them.

Guardianship Orders (GOs) are being applied more often in care of people suffering from mental illness (Hughes, 1991) and the elderly may have problems particularly suited to their use. Since many individual psychiatrists have little experience of GOs, we decided to examine our use of them. One of us had been involved in six orders over seven years working as a full-time consultant in the psychiatry of old age.

After 30 years of psychiatry in England I've just had a cold plunge through Canadian psychiatry as a staffman in an Ontario general hospital. Because science is international and a good many British psychiatrists work in Canada I expected clinical practice to be the same: but psychiatry is different on the two sides of the Atlantic. Before my raw, insistent perceptions of these differences fade, as they do so quickly when one adapts to a new life, I will write some of them down. However faulty they form a rough mirror in which we can all examine our own professional faces.

Health Advisory Service visits to services for the mentally ill in recent months keep throwing up a persistent theme: the apparent failure of the medical staff to provide the impetus that is necessary to develop and manage an effective comprehensive psychiatric service based upon the needs of patients rather than on professional or sectional interests.

The release of the antipsychotic agents risperidone, sertindole and olanzepine forces difficult choices upon clinicians. The new compounds are better tolerated than neuroleptics, expensive and their long-term side-effects unknown. These choices can be made easier by the dose and side-effect minimisation procedure set out below, which aims to produce the greatest benefit and least harm from conventional neuroleptics.

Child psychiatrists are often requested to contribute to the formal special educational assessments of children for which the 1981 Education Act laid down a new procedure. Some of the evident aims were to enable some handicapped children to remain in ordinary school, to stress ‘needs’ rather than categories, to involve parents more closely in the procedures, and to emphasise the importance of the effect of the handicap on the learning process. The first year of this procedure was reviewed by Wardle (1986) who noted a number of advantages and disadvantages, and subsequently the College (1988) recommended that the working of the Act should be reviewed, particularly because of delays and the cumbersomeness of the procedures.

It is possible to tackle exclusion by altering the nature of transactions between individuals and groups, including mental health services. One way to do this is to cultivate ‘social capital’ or interdependence between individuals and groups – as well as giving, each is entitled, but not compelled, to claim something in return. It is difficult, if not impossible, to sustain stigma and social exclusion when people are meeting mutual needs, building trust and helping each other. Mental health providers can foster social capital by creating community cohesion, namely interdependent relationships between individuals and organisations. This approach has been put into practice in the USA, where providers assert that small investments in building social capital return many times the cost. In the UK there is evidence that community development can make a contribution to mental health but it does not fit well with conventional approaches to mental health services – it calls for different skills and a vision that is collective rather than individualised.

The aim of this study was to determine the extent to which general practitioners are informed of and involved in their psychiatric patients' discharge plans, their satisfaction with the present level and methods for improvement. Postal questionnaires were sent to 100 GPs from different practices in England. They reported a high level of dissatisfaction with the present frequency with which they are informed of and involved in discharge plans before the event. They report being informed and involved too infrequently or randomly, or both. This dissatisfaction could generally be resolved by pre-discharge telephone discussion with a member (preferably medical) of the multidisciplinary team.