Dependency refers to an individual's attachment to and reliance on others. There are at least two different kinds of dependent behaviour. Person-oriented dependency includes close physical proximity, affectionate contact and verbal interchanges. Task-oriented dependency is concerned with help given for personal activities such as dressing and assistance with jobs around the house (Maccoby and Masters, 1970).

It has repeatedly been asserted, mainly on clinical evidence, that mothers of school-phobic children are overprotective, even when their youngsters are of secondary school age (Berg, 1970). The project reported in this paper was carried out to see if an objective method of assessment would support this view.

The major emphasis in psychoanalytic literature has been on the aetiology of male, rather than female, homosexuality (Socarides, 1968; Wiedeman, 1962). Those psychoanalytic writers who deal with the parent-child relations of homosexual women present a wide diversity of contrasting descriptions and explanations (Bacon, 1967; Bene, 1965; Fromm and Elonen, 1951; Socarides, 1963). One systematic research approach that has evolved from the psychoanalytic literature involves the evaluation of the ‘triangular system’ hypothesis (Bieber et al., 1962). This hypothesis was formulated as an explanation for male homosexuality, and most of the studies to date that relate to it report on male samples (Siegelman, 1972b). The family pattern of the ‘triangular system’ depicted for male homosexuals is a close-binding, intimate, controlling mother and a detached, hostile, rejecting father (Bieber et al., 1962). Kaya et al., (1967), using questions and methods quite similar to Bieber et al., found that homosexual, compared to heterosexual, women patients had fathers who were close-binding and intimate—the converse of the parent behaviour noted for male homosexuals. Kaya et al., however, found that the mothers of the lesbians did not differ in behaviour from the mothers of the non-lesbians. In a study of 25 adolescent lesbian patients, Kremer and Rifkin (1969) found that the fathers of the homosexual women were hostile, exploitative, detached, and absent, but they were not close-binding. The mothers in the Kremer and Rifkin study were described as overburdened and inadequate in handling their responsibilities. Using 27 items from the Bieber et al. (1962) study, Thompson (1971) discovered that the mothers of non-clinical homosexual women were close-binding and intimate, while their fathers were hostile and detached. Many of the Bieber et al. (1962) questions were also used by Gundlach and Riess (1968), who reported that the parents of non-clinical lesbians were not different from the parents of non-lesbians.

Since Freud's remark that unavailability of a strong and friendly father figure favours the development of homosexuality, the notion has prevailed that, in males, homosexuality and/or ‘femininity’ are due either to the father's physical unavailability or to a disturbance of the father-son relationship. If this hypothesis were valid, one would expect that such gross defect in male role learning as appears in transsexual males should be quite clearly associated with unreplaced father loss or various forms of gross deficiency in father-son relations.

Studies in Great Britain concerning intentional self-harm in adolescents have been few (Haldane and Haider, 1967; Leese, 1969). Such behaviour amongst teenagers is now common, and usually takes the form of self-poisoning with drugs; in fact it is probably becoming commoner, although the reasons for this are not altogether clear. The present survey concerns 50 consecutive patients aged between 14 and 19 years, admitted to the General Hospital, Birmingham, following self-harm behaviour in 1970 and 1971. The lower age limit for the group was determined by hospital admission policy, since children under 14 are admitted elsewhere in the city. All the patients had taken drug overdoses, and none had used other methods of self-harm, such as wrist-slashing. All cases classified as intoxication or poisoning within these age limits admitted to the hospital during the relevant period were scrutinized, and care was taken to make sure that no cases of intentional self-harm were being overlooked amongst so-called accidental poisoning. All patients in the intentional self-poisoning group were interviewed by the psychiatrist within 24 hours of regaining full consciousness. Information was obtained in a standard form covering specific aspects of the history. The parents (when available and willing) were seen either by medical staff or by a social worker in an open-ended interview. The Eysenck Personality Inventory (EPI) and Raven's Progressive Matrices test were administered by the psychiatrist at a later date, when all drug effects had worn off.

The aim of this paper is to describe and compare the prevalence patterns of completed suicide and so-called ‘attempted suicide’ or parasuicide, as they occur in a single, defined population over the same period of time.

Hald and Jacobsen (1948) introduced disulfiram as an adjunct in the treatment of alcoholism. Its usefulness has, however, been limited by the ease with which patients may discontinue medication and resume drinking. A preparation of disulfiram suitable for implantation was developed some years ago, and though its use has been mainly confined to the continent of Europe, several case reports have been published in this country (Kellam et al., 1968; Kellam, 1969). Madden and Malcolm (1972) suggest, from a follow-up study of 47 alcoholics, that implantation is followed by a period of sobriety of about six months, but they have made no comparison with a control group of patients.

This paper describes a double-blind drug trial to assess the effect of sulthiame on the behaviour of very disturbed mentally handicapped patients. Behaviour problems (especially hyperkinesis) are among the main causes of admission when parents or guardians cannot cope at home; and in hospital such patients constitute the main problems of management and reduce the time available for other patients. Moreover the present recognized treatments seem to have little effect on such behaviour if given within a dosage that avoids side-effects.

Good results with the use of lithium salts in the premenstrual tension syndrome have been reported (Sletten and Gershon, 1966); these observations await confirmation. The value of lithium is suggested by its known capacity to affect water and electrolyte balance implicated in the pathophysiology of the syndrome, and by its efficacy in psychiatric disorders characterized by periodicity. We therefore undertook a controlled study on the efficacy of lithium in the syndrome.

The therapeutic effect of lithium in mania was first described by Cade (1949), but the possibility that lithium could have a prophylactic action in recurrent affective disorders was not suggested until some years later (Hartigan, 1963; Baastrup, 1964). The early studies of the prophylactic action of lithium were open trials, in which both investigator and patient knew that the patient was receiving the drug. More recently, controlled double-blind studies have confirmed these early reports (Melia, 1970; Coppen et al., 1971; Cundall et al., 19712).

The anti-psychotic properties of flupenthixol have been described by Gottfries (1971) and Gross and Kaltenback (1965), and its antidepressant action by Reiter (1969), Merskey (1971), and Hall and Coleman (1973). It is available in the form of its decanoate in oil (‘Depixol’) as a depot injection.

When a doctor sees a patient it is important that he should have an accurate account of that patient's previous drug treatment. An earlier study (Ballinger and Stewart, 1971) showed that there were inconsistencies in the various reports of a patient's drug treatment immediately before admission to a psychiatric hospital. It seemed very likely that this problem was not limited to this one situation, and general practitioners have often criticized the quality of the information received after a patient has been discharged from hospital. The present survey attempted to assess the quality of the information about drug treatment sent to general practitioners at the time of discharge.

The possibility of understanding self and others through the use of drugs has entertained and intrigued the imagination of man for centuries. The accidental discovery of d-lysergic acid diethylamide-25 (LSD) by Hofman in 1943 brought this possibility closer to realization than ever before.

How far are the traditional skills of psychiatry relevant to the everyday problems of our time? Or, put differently, do the goals of psychiatry reach beyond identifying someone as mentally ill and treating such an individual?

Where preventable causes of a disorder are unknown, the epidemiologist will be concerned to search for an association between an environmental factor and some attribute of the disorder, commonly its incidence. In choosing what environmental factors to study, the epidemiologist will be attracted, firstly to those which on current hypotheses seem likely to have a causal role, and secondly to those for which the necessary data are easily collected. No doubt it is for the second of these reasons that studies have been made on the relation between schizophrenia and season of birth: the date of birth of a patient is rarely unknown, and the information, which may be accepted as being accurate in the great majority of instances, is routinely recorded in the case notes of most hospitals and clinics. All that the investigator has to do (it would seem) is to count the numbers of patients born in the different seasons of the year and compare these with the numbers to be expected from the season-of-birth distribution of the general population.

Since Schiavone and Kaldor (16) reported the incidental finding of increased creatine Phosphokinase (CPK) in patients with schizophrenia a number of studies of the enzyme have appeared in the literature. Bengzon et al. (2), reported among a group of 30 schizophrenics, CPK elevations, which returned to normal during the course of treatment with phenothiazines. These authors investigated a second group of 60 untreated patients who were ‘acutely psychotic’ and found abnormally high CPK levels in half of them. However no mention was made of diagnostic criteria, nor of attempts to control for extraneous circumstances known to elevate the enzyme.