It is surprising that devotees (and who isn't) of our ever-expanding multidisciplinary psychiatric teams have so far ignored the contribution that could so usefully be made by our colleagues the Estate Agents. Psychiatric hospitals advertising jobs and Estate Agents selling properties share a common problem and a common phraseology. The purpose of this paper is to suggest that we could usefully learn from each other in a properly constituted multidisciplinary setting.

In the past five years increasing concern has been expressed within the medical profession at the wastage of medical manpower arising from the failure fully to utilize the skills of women doctors who are only able, because of domestic commitments, to work part-time.

Council set up a Special Committee* to look into the problems of mentally ill doctors, to make recommendations as to ways in which the College might help and to consider the ‘three wise men’ procedure.

Some years ago, I wrote an article about psychiatric residency training in the United States. As my own experiences on making enquiries in England had been that very few people knew what went on or was available in the US. I felt that it might help those who were contemplating taking some or all of their postgraduate training there. Also, that it might be helpful to those wanting to make some comparisons between the training they were receiving in England and that available in the US.

Members are reminded that increased rates of some annual subscriptions, details of which are shown below, were approved at the Annual General Meeting of the College of 5 July, 1978. These rates will operate as from 1 January, 1979.

Doubtless, you have all heard of the moral treatment of insanity. But shutting a man up in an asylum can hardly be called moral treatment. It is simply restraint, which may be highly beneficial, and even remedial, as it is a means whereby the patient obtains rest and seclusion from all that is harassing and vexing, but it is not what I understand by moral treatment. For in old days men were placed in asylums, and then and there confined in a restraint-chair or strait-waistcoat, by leg-locks and hand-cuffs, and fed, washed, and dressed; and this together with some purging and blistering, constituted the treatment. By the latter, I mean that personal contact and influence of man over man, which the sane can exercise over the insane, and which we see so largely and beneficially exercised by those having the gift, whether superintendents, matrons, or attendants. There can be no proper treatment of an insane person without it, and, beyond all question, the recovery of many has been delayed or prevented by its absence. There are patients, however, who are not within its reach. A man or woman in a state of acute delirious mania is beyond moral treatment, and needs only that which is physical or medicinal. That is why it is of little importance whether we treat such in or out of an asylum, provided we can place them in a suitable apartment.

Henri Ey died on 6 November 1977. For 40 years he had been the dominant figure of French psychiatry. He came from an exceptional generation and trained at the same time as Pierre Male, Jacques Lacan and Sacha Nacht, who together led psychoanalysis in France. Ey himself, though, was not an analyst, but he tried to integrate psychoanalysis with general psychiatry. In this he was much influenced by Hughlings Jackson. The book he wrote in 1938 with Julien Rouart, which was expanded and republished in 1975 as Des Idées de Jackson à un Modèle Organodynamique expressed the views which dominated his life. He thought that psychiatry could not avoid looking at the articulation of diverse levels of psychic life, and their disorganization.

In March 1974 the DES and DHSS published a Joint Circular giving advice to local authorities on the provision and organization of Child Guidance (1). It recommended the establishment of interdisciplinary working parties whose brief would be to report to their Joint Consultative Committees (the function of which was defined by the DHSS in 1974) and hence, by December 1976, to the Ministries.

I believe it was Charles Kaleb Colton who wrote that: ‘Examinations are formidable even to the best prepared, for the greatest fool may ask more than the wisest man can answer.’ Few statements are both so true and so comforting to the examination candidate, and so usefully cautionary for the examiner.