All animal species have a high potential rate of increase, which must imply a high potential rate of death. Professor Holliday (1) has said: “Something must die, either the sperm, or the egg, or the embyro, or the infant or the adult … Most animals maintain a population at a fairly constant level—there are fluctuations of numbers, but they are fluctuations round a mean. There is a strong element of stability in nature. How is the population fixed at this relatively stable level? Two schools of thought exist. One says that the rules of Malthus apply strictly to the animal world—starvation, disease and predators are the stabilizers and do an immediate and effective job. The other, developed by Professor Wynne-Edwards in Aberdeen, says that animals limit their numbers before starvation does it for them. It is part of the animal's social organization and it is based on instinctive patterns of behaviour. Only a proportion of the population is allowed to breed and those who lose this right in competition become outcasts.”

New methods of treatment often prove to be valuable tools of clinical investigation. The advent of antidepressant drugs enhanced knowledge about depressive disorders, while the introduction of psychoanalytic techniques yielded a rich harvest from the field of psychopathology. Yet another technique which can throw fresh light on psychopathology is electric aversion, a method now used increasingly in the treatment of certain sexual disorders. With this method separate symptoms can be treated in turn, and their interrelations can thus be changed and studied. With careful clinical control and measurement we can examine the importance of various aspects of sexual disorders hitherto open to observation but not to detailed modification.

On 30 March, 1966, at the Symposium “Enzymes in Mental Health” sponsored by the Carl Neuberg Society for International Scientific Relations, A. Hoffer (1) described the apparently successful treatment in 13 of 17 (acute and chronic) schizophrenic patients in 3 to 5 days by the daily oral use of 1 to 2 grams of nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide (NAD), better known as diphosphopyridinenucleotide (DPN). Widespread publicity given to this announcement attests to the need of more effective treatment for this illness. It also occasioned frequent and persistent inquiry from schizophrenic patients and their relatives as to the suitability of this treatment in their own instance. Rapid confirmation of the findings would justify widespread efforts to evaluate this preparation, whereas failure of confirmation would provide reasonable grounds for a more cautious approach to its use. The members of the Council of the American College of Neuropsycho-pharmacology decided that, as a group of impartial scientists, it would be appropriate for them to carry out such an investigation as rapidly as was compatible with adequate determination of the usefulness of the preparation.

The effect that childhood experience may have upon the individual's adult life has always been a subject of great interest.

Since the publication of Freud's essay on “Mourning and Melancholia” (1917), much thought has been devoted to the influence of bereavement in childhood, more especially as an antecedent to depressive illness in the adult. Bereavement is peculiarsluyitable for such an investigation since the death of a parent is one of the few reasonably frequent events which are largely independent of the behavioural pattern of the family.

The effect of loss of parents during childhood has been the subject of many studies. Although most reports agree that some emotional disturbance occurs in the child, it is not yet clear what are the late effects of such separations in adult psychiatric health and behaviour. Brown (1961) and Munro (1965) pointed out that childhood bereavement before the age of 15 is not a rare experience: both studies report an incidence of over 19 per cent, in non-psychiatric populations. While some studies (e.g. Brown, 1961) reported an increased frequency of bereavement in childhood in depressed patients, other studies (e.g. Hopkinson and Reed, 1966) failed to confirm this. Furthermore, as Ainsworth (1962) pointed out, the term “parental deprivation” requires careful definition. It can refer to insufficiency of parent-child interaction (which cannot be assumed to follow automatically in every separation, because of the presence of parent substitutes), to grief reactions which may be supposed to follow parental loss and predispose to depression (Bowlby, 1961) and to distortions of parent-child relationships. The psychological consequences of parental loss could be expected to differ according to the degree of pre-separation distortions of relationships.

Recent studies of childhood bereavement in depressive populations (Forrest, Fraser, and Priest, 1965; Munro, 1966) indicate that parental bereavement in childhood may be of aetiological significance in depressive illness (Forrest et al., 1965) and may affect the severity of the clinical picture (Munro, 1966).

The term “phenomenology” was imported into psychiatry from the field of philosophy. I intend to give a brief and necessarily simplified account of its philosophical background, the various meanings applied to it, and some of the clinical implications following from it.

This paper deals briefly with a few clinical observations made in the course of studies of changes in subjective experience reported by young patients in the early stages of schizophrenia. These studies aimed at delineating the early schizophrenic clinical picture in as specific a manner as possible with a view to later experimental validation, and the clinical findings concerning a group of forty young schizophrenics have been reported elsewhere (Chapman, 1966). The observations on which this paper is based were obtained by the same method of examination and interview technique as previously reported, the observer deliberately identifying with the patient, adopting his particular style of communication and encouraging him in the direct projection of his experiences. Thus these observations have been taken out of a matrix of abnormalities in cognitive function found in schizophrenic patients, and have to do chiefly with their visual imagery and motility. Before proceeding to present and discuss these observations it may be worth while to provide a background against which to view them, by referring first to what we know of normal imagery, and second to the breakdown in perception and cognition found in the patients from whom these observations were derived.

One current classification of depression divides the syndrome into psychotic and non-psychotic varieties. It is interesting that a similar classification developed over a thousand years ago out of some words of St. Paul. In his Second Epistle to the Corinthians, Ch. 7, v. 10, Paul wrote: “For godly sorrow worketh repentance to salvation not to be repented of, but the sorrow of the world worketh death.” The word sorrow used in English translations of the Bible stood for the tristitia of Latin versions (Greek λνπη); connoting sadness, sorrow, despondency, depression. Paul's distinction between the two kinds of tristitia, the one “from God” and the other “of the world”, led mediaeval theologians to enlarge on differences between the two kinds of depression.

Juvenile delinquency is generally considered to be one of present-day society's most serious problems. Indeed, more than half of all serious crimes in the United States are committed by youths under 18 years of age (3). Despite its magnitude and prevalence, juvenile delinquency is still inadequately defined, much less understood, partly because of its having only lately been recognized as a distinct practical problem and thus a fit matter for investigation. Over the past four decades, however, there has been an increasingly active study of the problem, focusing on the delinquent youths themselves and, more recently, on the environment in which they have developed. Methodological approaches to the question of definition and causality of delinquency have been diverse, but can be considered as being of two general types: the deductive-theoretical, in which a stated hypothesis is critically examined in the light of clinical experience as illustrated by clinical material; and, the inductive-empirical approach, in which a body of data, e.g., the environmental factors found in delinquents, is analysed, and conesions are drawn, based on the results of that aysis.