The development of student health services in colleges and universities has led, during the past decade, to a growing awareness of the importance of mental health problems in student populations (see Davy, 1960; Malleson, 1963).

Seventy-three male alcoholics permitted information to be obtained from official sources about time recorded as lost from work in receipt of sickness or unemployment benefits and about their weekly state insurance contributions. The average yearly time loss was 121.7 working days per person, comprising an average yearly loss through sickness of 86.1 and through unemployment of 35.6 working days respectively. By contrast the recorded national sickness loss for men in a comparable twelve months period averaged 15.9 working days per person.

Thirteen alcoholics showed over five years, prolonged deficiency in work attendance. State benefits to the subjects, over twelve months during the early 1970s, totalled £18,434.80. Diagnoses on their medical certificates underestimated incapacity from alcoholism.

Recent studies of childhood bereavement in depressive populations (Forrest, Fraser, and Priest, 1965; Munro, 1966) indicate that parental bereavement in childhood may be of aetiological significance in depressive illness (Forrest et al., 1965) and may affect the severity of the clinical picture (Munro, 1966).

Huntington's Chorea presents us with a good “model” of brain disease in that we know the extent of the contribution of heredity, in contrast to a condition such as schizophrenia regarding which many authors (cf. Alanen, 1958) would be prepared to defend the concept of pseudo-heredity. Secondly the disease carries a fairly uniform prognosis, and finally it results in a distinctive disturbance of motor function which permits of some accuracy in diagnosis and some criterion for objective measurement.

A case of paranoid psychosis induced by phentermine in a young woman with no previous history of psychiatric illness is presented.

Crimes relating to sexual behaviour account for only 1 per cent of all indictable crimes but for half a century sex offenders have been the subject of a disproportionate amount of psychiatric interest and enquiry. The belief, that there is a link between specific mental malfunction and sex offending, as distinct from other forms of offending appears to have wide acceptance. In 1972 the Royal College of Psychiatrists appeared sufficiently confident of this view to ask candidates aspiring to membership of the College to “Give an account of the psychopathology of rape”. Like incest and buggery, rape is an act, a deed, an item of behaviour. To speak of the aetiology, treatment and prognosis of such acts is to misapply terminology and to confuse criminal behaviour with mental disorder. The problem is not simply one of semantic niceties for the sloppy use of medical language in this controversial area can lead jurists and policy-makers to carry expectations that lack any firm psychiatric basis. This contribution will attempt to review some legal and psychiatric aspects of the more serious crimes.

The previous and subsequent convictions of all those charged with rape in 1961 were studied, together with circumstances of the criminal offence. The proportion of victims whose names were published in newspapers was high (26 per cent), and a high proportion of accused were acquitted (22 per cent). They fell fairly obviously into paedophiliac rapes of girls under 14 (30 per cent), ‘aggressive’ rapists (20 per cent) with a record of other aggressive offences, and ‘others' (50 per cent) with few if any other convictions. Various aspects of the records of these groups are considered. The paedophiles tended to have a wider age range and more often pleaded or were found guilty, and more of them received a medical disposal, rare in others. A small but similar proportion of acquitted and convicted were subsequently convicted of another rape.

Chlormethiazole (Heminevrin) is a sedative and anticonvulsant that has been reported by Glatt et al. (1965) to be more effective than placebo for the alcohol abstinence syndrome. The present study was designed to compare the substance with trifluoperazine (Stelazine).

Assessments of some of the symptoms and behaviour problems of long-term psychiatric patients living in the community were obtained independently from clinical interviews with such patients, and from interviews with day staff, residential staff and families caring for them. In general, interviews with residential staff and family members revealed much higher levels of symptoms and behaviour problems than either of the other two interviews. These findings have implications for research and clinical practice including the fact that adequate assessments should include the testimony of family or residential staff.

“The history of man for the nine months preceeding his birth would, probably, be far more interesting and contain events of greater moment than for all the three score and ten years that follow it.” Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1885)

The present study compares the rate of weight gain during refeeding in 15 anorectic patients who were weighed daily with that of 15 who were weighed three times per week. There was no significant difference between the two groups.

The German occupation of Poland in 1939 was accompanied by the destruction of the existing medical system, and the first victims of the Nazi terror were psychiatric patients in hospitals – around 15 000 were exterminated and about 10 000 died as a result of malnourishment.

Secondary school pupils and their parents were investigated using the scaled version of the General Health Questionnaire (GHQ–28) and by a questionnaire designed to study attitudes involved in inter-generational conflict in psychiatric patients. Parent-pupil and interparental conflict in answers to the attitude questionnaires were taken as measures of inter-generational and intra-generational conflicts respectively. The former significantly exceeded the latter. Parent-student conflict was higher when the students involved were females, Kuwaiti, or had less educated fathers. The tendency of the number of reported GHQ symptoms to be higher in members of families with higher inter-generational conflict did not reach statistical significance. There is an apparent discrepancy between this finding and the prominence of inter-generational conflict in clinical material.

Particular instances of sexual deviation can not be discussed sensibly without first considering certain general issues.

The first of these is the question of definition. The notion of what constitutes abnormal sexual behaviour has changed in the course of history and indeed its boundaries have expanded and contracted at different times. What emerges from the history of the concept is that it has been defined by the social and moral climate of the time and indeed sexual deviance can be seen, for the most part, as a social rather than a medical concept (Bancroft, 1974).

Besides a global health crisis, the COVID-19 pandemic has potential to have a severe and long-lasting psychological impact on frontline healthcare workers such as paramedics. It is imperative to shed light on these mental health issues and employ interventions to protect the mental wellness of this vulnerable group of healthcare workers.