The aims of this study were, first, to estimate the prevalence of depressive disorders in Australian nursing home residents using international diagnostic criteria, and second, to explore environmental determinants of such disorders. Residents of 24 nursing homes were surveyed using the Canberra Interview for the Elderly (CIE) and a range of environmental measures was also taken. Of 323 residents who were screened for cognitive impairment, 165 (51%) scored 18 or above on the Mini-Mental State Examination (Folstein et al. 1975), and were interviewed with the CIE. According to DSM-III-R criteria and the CIE, the prevalence of major depressive episode was 9·7%. Using ICD-10 criteria, 6·1% of residents suffered from a severe depressive episode, 6·7% from a moderate depressive episode and 6·7% from a mild depressive episode. Some measures of the social environment were significantly related to depressive symptoms.

Current methods of measuring quality of life (QoL) impose an external value system on individuals, rather than allowing them to describe their lives in terms of those factors which they consider important. The Schedule for the Evaluation of Individual Quality of Life (SEIQoL) was developed to overcome such limitations. The QoL of 42 healthy attenders at an international immunization clinic was assessed using SEIQoL. Judgement reliability was high (r = 0·74) and individuals' judgement policies accounted for a large percentage of the variance in overall QoL (R2 = 0·75) demonstrating the construct validity of judgement analysis in this context.

In a second study of QoL of out-patients suffering from irritable bowel syndrome (IBS) (N = 20) or peptic ulcer disease (PUD) (N = 20) was assessed using SEIQoL. Judgement reliability was lower (r = 0·54) although statistically highly significant (P < 0·01), and the variance in overall QoL judgements explained was high (R2 = 0·74).

SEIQoL is an acceptable, reliable and valid technique for measuring individual QoL that takes greater account of individual perspectives than traditional measurement approaches.

This paper describes the referral pathways taken by 1554 patients newly referred to the mental health services in 11 countries, and documents factors associated with delays in referral. The pathways in centres relatively well provided with psychiatric staff were dominated by general practitioners and to a lesser extent hospital doctors: the relatively less well resourced centres showed a variety of pathways with native healers often playing an important part. Delays were remarkably short in all centres regardless of psychiatric resources, but in some centres we found longer delays on pathways involving native healers. Somatic problems were a common presentation in all centres, and in some centres there was a tendency for patients presenting with somatic problems to have longer delays than those with symptoms of depression or anxiety. The implications of these findings are discussed in the context of an ongoing programme of WHO research activities aimed at improving the quality of mental illness care available in community settings.

A measure has been developed which assesses a broad range of attitudes which women hold towards their bodies. The Ben-Tovim Walker Body Attitudes Questionnaire (BAQ) is a 44-item self-report questionnaire whose subscales encompass six distinct aspects of body experience (feelings of overall fatness, self-disparagement, strength, salience of weight, feelings of attractiveness and consciousness of lower body fat). The development of the BAQ involved administering increasingly refined versions to a wide range of female respondents. The final version appears to have satisfactory psychometric properties. When the BAQ scores of 29 patients with anorexia nervosa were compared with those of a large community sample, a more complex pattern of deviant attitudes appeared than would previously have been suspected. The BAQ appears to have potential as a research instrument in this and other fields in which the measurement of attitudes towards the body is important.

A 26-item informant questionnaire (IQCODE) and the Mini-Mental State Examination (MMSE) were compared as screening tests for dementia in a sample of 69 patients. Dementia diagnoses were made by both a clinician and a research interview using a computer algorithm to meet DSM-III-R and ICD-10 (Draft) criteria. The IQCODE was found to perform at least as well as the MMSE against all diagnoses and significantly better when judged against the algorithmic ICD-10 diagnoses. Also, the IQCODE was found to be uncontaminated by pre-morbid ability as estimated from the National Adult Reading Test and to have very high test–retest reliability after a delay of a day or more.