In recent months most of us have seen patients who have been in the Services and who now present features of psychiatric illness. Many of them are in the ordinary run of our experience, and we have no difficulties—other than the usual ones—of understanding the origins and pattern of their present distress. By and large, the ordinary clinical breakdowns occurring in the Services were of a kind familiar to us before the war, while during the war we became familiar with most of the disturbances of behaviour and feeling produced by specific stresses of service life. Many patients with difficulties of these two kinds were discharged the Services in the past, and others have since been demobilized. The large and compelling problem of their treatment and effective rehabilitation should not blind us to another newer problem—that of ex-servicemen who made satisfactory adjustments to civilian life before the war, and to service life during the war, but who are now in severe difficulties under the stresses presented to them by their return to civilian life. In a manner unexpected by the majority, they have become ill-at-ease in familiar surroundings, phobic, depressed or irritable, asocial, confused, retarded, aggressive, antisocial or restless. There is a mass of evidence to show that in addition to the clinical symptoms which lead some of them to seek help from medical men, their damaged attitudes disrupt other aspects of their lives—social, domestic or industrial—in serious and subtle ways.

Some 640 men and 170 women patients are detained in Broadmoor. The following account of the diversional therapy applied to their different types of mental disorder may be of interest.

The conscious involuntary immobility of which recognition has been described elsewhere (Rudolf, 1946a) appears to be a cataleptic or trance-like state. The psychological aspects have also been described (Rudolf, 1946b).

As you probably know, in January, 1944, the Provisional National Council for Mental Health were asked by the Board of Control to provide a Social After-Care Service for men and women discharged from Service Psychiatric Hospitals. For the purposes of this work an experienced psychiatric social worker, known as Regional After-Care Officer, was appointed to each of the Civil Defence Regions to undertake and organize this service. The psychiatric social workers visited the Psychiatric Service Hospitals in their areas, obtaining a full history and recommendations from the psychiatrist referring the case, and interviewing each patient to discuss his needs and plans. These reports were then sent to the Regional After-Care Officer in the patient's home area and formed the basis of our work.

During the six years of the war, from the opening of the hospital in September, 1939, until the end of September, 1945 (to choose a convenient end-point), 13,556 soldiers, sailors and airmen of non-commissioned rank were admitted to the wards of Sutton Emergency Hospital. From this number have been excluded all women, all foreign troops and prisoners of war, Dominions troops, foreign nationals in the British Army, and also a half dozen or so men of whose religious affiliation no record was kept. Apart from these few accidental exceptions, all men on admission to the hospital gave to a nurse particulars which included their religious affiliation, and which were subsequently entered on the Hospital's Admission Register. From this Register the data which will be discussed below have been obtained. It is to be noted that the religious classification is based solely on the men's own statements; and these may at times have been lacking in precision, or have implied a distinction which does not exist. It is doubtful, for instance, whether there is any real difference between “Wesleyans” and “Methodists”; but as this distinction was made by the men themselves it has been retained.

The following method of rapidly establishing the diagnosis of Bacillary Dysentery has been used at this hospital for the past sixteen years. It is reliable and simple. The technique allows for the transfer of material direct from the infected person to the laboratory medium and obviates waiting for specimens of patients' excreta to become available.

In a recent communication Andrews(1) claims that smears made from the end of the urethra of sexually immature or impotent males differ markedly from the smears obtained from a normal potent male.