Objective measurements taken from boys with and without a conduct disorder and with and without associated brain injury suggest that overactivity is a function of psychiatric disturbance rather than of an abnormality of the central nervous System. Very few of the children studied were consistently overactive or inattentive. Mothers' reports of overactivity tallied with a measure of conduct disturbance but not with objective measurements of activity or attention.

For 150 years the diagnostic concept at first called ‘moral insanity’ has been troubling psychiatric nosologists. Initially emphasis was laid on the affective disturbance in this condition, which was unaccompanied by intellectual impairment. Then its conformity to the idea of a degenerative process became prominent. At various times its relation to epilepsy, hereditary disease, and vice and crime has held the stage. Latterly little advantage has been taken of the information provided about personality by the investigations of psychologists.

Cortical somatosensory evoked responses to stimuli of various intensities were recorded in a group of patients with a diagnosis of ‘psychogenic pain’ and in three separate control groups. Differences emerged in the relationship between stimulus intensity and response amplitude. It is suggested that patients with psychogenic pain tended to deal with small stimuli in the way in which the other groups of patients dealt with large stimuli.

At the beginning of the 19th century France had many experts on the ‘moral treatment of insanity’. Very few of them, however, applied their experience and theories to the role of language in the development of behaviour from childhood on, in the pathogenesis of mental disorders, and in psychotherapy. To Dr. Louis Cerise, one of the founders of the Annales Médico-Psychologiques, belongs the great distinction of formulating a theory which tried to take account of the necessary contribution of language to individual development. In his book Des Fonctions et des Maladies Nerveuses (1842), he put forward a view of the relationship between the individual and society. His concept of ‘the goal of activity’ still merits our attention.

Results of studies of a large number of long-standing schizophrenic illnesses are discussed. On an average, schizophrenia showed no further change for the worse after a duration of five years, but rather a tendency to improve. The success and limitations of modern therapy were statistically determined. Many recovered schizophrenics continued to do well even without medication and social care. As a rule, schizophrenics had no endocrine pathology and endocrine patients were not schizophrenic. Neither a broken home in childhood nor an upbringing by a schizophrenic parent resulted in any important association with schizophrenia. However, a disturbed relationship with relatives and loved persons was more frequent in the anamnesis of schizophrenic women than of schizophrenic men. Most schizophrenics who had been schizoid before their psychosis had lived in miserable familial conditions.

Despite diagnostic imprecision and terminological confusion, the concept of personality disorder remains indispensable to clinical psychiatric practice. In relation to the International Classification of Diseases the problems were examined at a seminar which formed part of the World Health Organization's programme on Psychiatric Diagnosis, Classification, and Statistics. The conclusions of the seminar are presented in this paper.

The authors have examined the drug-taking histories of 46 schizophrenics and 46 matched controls. They have found that the schizophrenics on average used a wider variety of drugs, in greater amounts. Schizophrenics who had used drugs experienced the onset of symptoms on average four years earlier than non-users and were also admitted to hospital four years earlier, on average. Those schizophrenics who had used drugs had had better premorbid personalities than the non drug-users. These results are indicative of some precipitating role of drug abuse in the onset of schizophrenia.

Thirty drug-free patients suffering from chronic anxiety states were compared with 30 normal controls matched for age, sex, and social class on a variety of physiological and psychological measures. The tests included the electroencephalogram, the auditory evoked response, and skin conductance recorded during a passive and an active condition and auditory reaction time, the digit symbol substitution test, and arithmetic. The patients showed increased EEG voltage, shorter latencies of the evoked response, higher skin conductance levels, higher pulse rate and less pupillary constriction, and they responded less to the increase in activation. They also showed impairment on complex psychological tests. It is concluded that pathological anxiety involves an increase in arousal irrelevant to the task and has a disorganizing rather than a facilitating effect on performance.

Thirty-five males with double Y chromosome were studied. Among the features observed in certain subgroups of these 35 were a more than average height, minor vertebral abnormalities, abnormal seminiferous epithelium, minor EEG abnormalities, and a mean intelligence level significantly below the expected. Fifteen of the 35 were found in institutions for criminals. The frequency of XYY males among 1,500 criminal males was 8·67 per 1,000 compared with 1·24 per 1,000 among 6,455 randomly selected males in the general population. Males with double Y chromosome tended to have more difficulties at school, to be more mentally immature, to be more impulsive than their siblings, and to have more difficulty in making relationships with others.

An account is given of how research over the last 30 years has led to progress in the delineation of the mechanisms involved in the genesis of the behaviour covered by the term ‘infantile autism’. The validity, nature, and basis of the syndrome are discussed with reference to treatment.

A study of four 47XYY subjects and their families is reported. These subjects were all exceptionally tall; were mostly of good intelligence and from intelligent families; and all had a history of delinquency or criminality, although they came from respectable homes. Evidence is presented, however, to suggest that both adverse environmental influences and constitutional factors other than their supernumary chromosomes nevertheless operated in these cases, indicating that their deviant behaviour need not be directly related to their chromosomal abnormality. The implications of these findings are discussed with respect especially to their bearing on conclusions drawn in the literature on the XYY syndrome.

Abnormally high levels of various amino acids were maintained in the bloodstream of rats, causing saturation of amino acid transport into the brain and partial exclusion from the brain of other amino acids which are necessary for protein synthesis. Excluded amino acids could be made to enter the brain by raising their concentration in the bloodstream. The possible relevance of these findings to improvements in the dietary treatment of some inborn errors of metabolism is discussed.

Twenty outpatients with chronic anxiety states were tested on a large battery of physiological and psychological tests after amylobarbitone sodium, chlordiazepoxide, diazepam, and medazepam given in flexible dosage and compared with a placebo. Each patient received all five treatments for two to four weeks under double-blind conditions, as part of a fully balanced design. The tests included the electroencephalogram, the auditory evoked response, skin conductance, the Digit Symbol Substitution Test, the Gibson Spiral Maze, and arithmetic tests, together with psychiatrist and patient ratings. Correlations within and between the different measures were computed. The benzodiazepines depressed slow wave and increased fast wave activity of the EEG, diminished the evoked response, reduced fluctuations in the skin conductance, and decreased motor speed on the Gibson Maze. Amylobarbitone had less physiological effect but impaired performance on the Gibson Maze and arithmetic tests. Significant correlations were found between the mean Hamilton and patient ratings and the physiological measures. It is concluded that physiological changes show useful correlations with clinical effects.