These studies of association between types of moustache and personality features were made during World War II in two officer-selection Boards (U.K., Male). The Boards contained Senior Officers (who interviewed each candidate), “Military Testing Officers” (who graded on practical tests given over three days residence), and a psychiatrist. A “Psychological Testing Team” conducted written tests. Board results were expressed as “pass” or “fail” or “referred back”. The ratings upwards of “pass” were DD, D, C, B and A. Men considered too unadaptable for officer grade (and so “failing”), but likely to become or to remain good N.C.O.s, were (for the information of the Board) specially noted as “fail: N.C.O.”. The “referred back” men were rated NY (“Not Yet”—chance of further maturity). In this paper “pass” and “fail” are placed in inverted commas to emphasize that ratings had reference to selection for one role only—that of Commissioned Officer.

Jealousy is more than a psychiatric symptom. Its language is universal: the conduct and feelings of the jealous man and woman have repeatedly drawn the attention of the great observers of human nature, the moralists and the philosophers as well as the poets and the novelists. They have, on the whole, described the reaction more successfully than they have defined it. Even the most celebrated definitions—Descartes' “kind of fear related to a desire to preserve a possession” or Spinoza's “mixture of hate and love”, for example— merely illustrate the complexity of a term whose many nuances of meaning can be detected in its roots. The English adjective “jealous” and the noun “jealousy” are derived respectively from the French “jaloux” and “jalousie”, both taken from the old Provençal “gilos”; “gilos” in turn may be traced back to the vulgar Latin adjective “zelosus” which comes from the late Latin “zelus” and so indirectly from the Greek ζηλoς. In its transmission the word has thus been debased. It has ceased to denote “zeal” or “ardour”; the “noble passion” which stood opposed to “envy” for the Greeks has acquired a pejorative quality. In modern German the distinction is preserved verbally, “Eifersucht” having been formed from the original “Eifer” (zeal) and the suffix “-sucht”, which is cognate with “siech”, meaning “sickly”. Amorous jealousy claims associations of its own. During the seventeenth century the French word “jalousie” acquired the meaning of “blind” or “shutter”; in this sense it entered the English language as a noun in the early nineteenth century; the transmutation is thought to have signified a jocular reference to the suspicious husband or lover who could watch unobserved behind the jalousie; the Italian word “gelosia” is used in this way as early as the middle of the sixteenth century. In the Scandinavian languages separate words designate amorous jealousy. (1) The Swedish “svartsjuk”, literally “black sick”, is taken from an old expression which identified jealousy with the wearing of black socks; the Danish “skinsyg”, “afraid of getting skin (a rebuff)”, harks back to an old link of jealousy with skin which may in turn have been connected with hose or socks. (2) The origin of the colours which are traditionally employed to depict jealousy, especially black, yellow and green, is obscure.

In order to test whether a drug is an inhibitor of monoamine oxidase in the human subject, three main measures are available:

1. We can measure an increased excretion of the normal substrates of the enzyme, e.g. tryptamine (Sjoerdsma, et al., 1959b).

2. We can measure a decreased excretion of the metabolites resulting from the enzyme's action, e.g. 5-hydroxyindoleacetic acid (5-HIAA).

3. We can administer a loading dose of an enzyme substrate and observe how the subject deals with it before and after the drug, e.g. 5-hydroxytryptamine (Sjoerdsma et al., 1958), and epinephrine (N-methyl-C14) (Resnick et al., 1958).

The following study was designed to compare the effectiveness of imipramine (Tofranil) and pheniprazine (Cavodil) in the treatment of endogenous depression. Controlled trials have shown the value of imipramine (Holdway, 1960) and therefore no placebo group was included. The theoretical advantages of a cross-over technique were considered to be outweighed by such disadvantages as the tendency for the effects of the first therapeutic agent to continue into the second phase of the experiment; and the tendency for rapid remissions to occur with anti-depressive drugs and to persist for a period despite withdrawal. Thus two similar groups of patients, each treated with full dosage of their respective drugs, were compared. The selection of patients was randomized, and the trial was blind throughout.

Weckowicz, Sommer and Hall (14) in a paper on the size and distance perception of schizophrenic patients relate their results to a theory of the normal perception of size and distance. This paper analyses more fully some aspects of their results, since they provide evidence against the theory of perception which Weckowicz et al. accept.

It may be recalled that the Recommendations adopted by the General Medical Council in 1957 refrained from specifying the period of time to be allotted to particular subjects, or the sequence in which they should be taught. They considered the primary task to be that of finding means to reduce the congestion in the curriculum: to instruct less and to educate more: and they trusted that the licensing bodies and schools would not feel limited in their right, even their duty, to experiment with different courses and various methods of teaching.

This work was originally started because attention had been drawn to the high suicide rate in Hampstead. Geffen and Warren (1) originally reported this high rate. During the last ten years it has varied between 20 and 30 per 100,000 inhabitants (see Table I). It also compares with the suicide death rate of 10 per 100,000 for the whole community.

It is the custom of our times to explain neurological, and, to some extent, psychiatric disorders by reference to a static or diagrammatic conception of the physiology of the nervous system, linked with the findings of morbid anatomy. But, in the words of Riese (1950), expressed in his Principles of Neurology:

“Can the behaviour of a living organism be interpreted as purely mechanical? Though the organism remains submitted to the law of mechanics and physics, and though it is to the benefit of a steady improvement of our factual knowledge to explore the mechanics to the maximum possible, we must recognize that in a living organism mechanics are not left to themselves (which means to chance), but that they are at the service of a directing agency best described as the organism's welfare. The reflex must be conceived as an instrument of this agent. All disorders analysed and described in terms of reflex action are only instrumental ones. Neither the physician's task nor his possibilities extend beyond this limit. The directing forces of the organism will be withheld forever from the physician's acting power, if only for the reason that these forces are just ideas or principles of interpretation, but not perceptible realities.”

So many new compounds are now being introduced for the treatment of psychiatric disorders that it is difficult for the clinician to assess the accuracy of the claims made for them. If a form of therapy is one hundred per cent. effective in a disease which was previously one hundred per cent. fatal, for example vitamin B12 in pernicious anaemia, the question of a controlled trial does not arise. But even the manufacturers do not claim such a degree of effectiveness for drugs advocated for the treatment of mental illnesses, and in addition the natural course of such illnesses is very variable, so that it is essential that clinical trials of these drugs should be controlled. Foulds (1958) has reviewed British and American clinical trials of drugs in psychiatry during the years 1951 to 1956, and has shown that the less controlled a trial, the more likely it is to result in a favourable report on the drug being tested, presumably because of bias on the part of the clinician. Forrester (1958), however, on the basis of a completely uncontrolled trial of Stelazine on only twenty-five patients, concluded that “the amount of improvement in a few cases was not sufficient to encourage the further use of the drug”.

Four experiments were carried out on chronic female schizophrenic patients in order to determine the differential effects of colour upon their behaviour. The three primary colours, red, blue and green, were used. The patients, who fell into Arieti's second or third stages of schizophrenia, had a mean age of 45 years (range 38-50), and a mean duration of hospitalization of 19 years (range 9-30). All experiments were carried out in a small side room painted white, the colour of which could be changed by the use of coloured lights hanging centrally from the ceiling. The colours used had a fixed intensity of 2 foot candles at a distance of 2 feet.

There are many reports referring to incidence of agranulocytosis in patients receiving phenothiazines. This and the potential hepatotoxic effect of this group of drugs have been the greatest drawback in their usage.

Consideration of the aetiology of behaviour disorders in epileptic children has been something of a test case in psychiatry: it divides sharply the “organicists” from the “environmentalists”, while those absorbed in psychopathological theory are given free scope to describe the complexity of dynamic mechanisms without committing themselves as to the ultimate aetiological factors.

The introduction of the new psychopharmacological agent haloperidol (R 1625, “Serenase”R) to psychiatric therapy provides an interesting supplement to the chemotherapeutic outfit available for the treatment of psychoses. It seems to be the first compound possessing neuroleptic powers of at least the same degree as the drugs used so far, in spite of a chemical structure quite different from reserpine and the drugs of the phenothiazine group.

As far as published records show, Europeans used proverbs for evaluating mental processes some years before they were similarly used in America. In 1906, Finckh (20) published his research concerning the use of proverbs in intelligence testing, which is still cited most frequently in Germany and considered the foundational research in this field. In 1907, Bühler (13) published his extended article dealing with the problems of studying the thinking process. He pointed out the value of proverbs because they were interesting while at the same time demanding all the psychic energy of the subject. In 1920, Achilles (1) used familiar and not so familiar proverbs in memory studies, testing children, adults and “insane patients”. In 1923, Piaget (39) referred to the use of proverbs for the study of thinking. Also in 1923, Ziehen (53) described the use of proverbs for testing the mentally gifted; both normal and clinical cases. In 1927, Bronner (11) reported a proverbs test being used in the United States. Thurstone's test consisted of two sets of 20 proverbs each.

Differences between the suicide rates in various parts of the same country or in different parts of an urban area have frequently been investigated. Correlations between the incidence of suicides in different districts of large cities and their socio-economic characteristics have been established (Cavan, 1928; Sainsbury, 1955). Suicide rates of contrasting communities, urban and rural, have been compared (Carstairs and Brown, 1958).

One of the fundamental concerns of social psychiatrists is to determine whether social events can influence the onset and the course of a particular mental illness and, if so, in what ways. The problems involved are formidable. In schizophrenia, for example, it is necessary to have reliable means of measuring the manifestations and progress of the disease, as well as adequate methods for assessing social events. However, if these difficulties can be satisfactorily overcome, there is a way in which a preliminary experiment can be made.

Certain conditions associated with mental deficiency derive their name from some characteristic skeletal deformity. One of these is abnormal highheadedness or acrocephaly, a term often used interchangeably with oxycephaly, tower skull or turricephaly. To be sure, certain criteria have been recommended by some workers for confining each of the above terms to different sub-varieties of highheadedness and many alternative names have also been proposed (Günther 1941), but none of these have taken root. A distinction is made by many writers between acrocephaly and hypsocephaly or ordinary highheadedness: it is stated that the essential feature of acrocephaly is not highheadedness in itself but exaggerated upward pointing or angling of the head at some distance along its superior curvature so that, in theory, an acrocephalic head need not necessarily be hypsocephalic. However, it is doubtful if this distinction can always be sustained since many otherwise quite normal individuals have abnormal angling of the skull, while some recorded cases of acrocephaly presented a smooth and rounded profile of their upper cranial curvature in photographs and lateral skull X-rays.

Admission of patients with neurotic or personality disorders to psychiatric hospitals is fraught with a number of difficulties. These arise partly from the fact that the majority of psychiatric hospitals are designed primarily for the needs of psychotic patients. Other difficulties come from the character of the patients themselves and from the complexities of the treatment they require.

No detailed and comprehensive system of subclassification of chronic schizophrenia has been generally adopted in this country. Most psychiatrists are content to use the broad categories of simple, hebephrenic, catatonic, paranoid and undifferentiated schizophrenia. Placing a patient into one of these subgroups entails a judgment which is based upon all the information at the clinician's disposal. Such data are necessarily unstandardized; the method of collection varies from doctor to doctor and from patient to patient, and the criteria of classification are not uniformly agreed upon. No objective tests are available which would serve to check the accuracy of the decisions taken. It is inevitable, in these circumstances, that clinical systems of subclassification should not be much used for scientific purposes. The basic essential of a classifying instrument is that it should produce the same results in the hands of different investigators, and that its standards of measurement should not vary from one occasion to another. No study so far published has attempted to deal with this problem, which becomes more serious as the elaboration (and possibly the clinical usefulness) of the classification increases. Leonhard's system (1, 4, 5) for example, would gain enormously if its reliability could be demonstrated.

Two main difficulties are met with in epidemiological studies of mental disorders. Firstly, the problem of finding all the cases occurring in a population, or a representative sample of them; and secondly, the problem of classification.