An account is given of the overall strategy and measures used in a three-phase study of styles and techniques employed in the initial diagnostic interviews with the parents of children referred to a child psychiatric clinic. The measures of interview style included interviewer activity and talkativeness, directiveness, types of questions and statements, interventions designed to elicit or to respond to feelings, and non-verbal qualities. The informant's response and the interview ‘outcome’ were assessed through measures of the quantity and quality of factual information obtained, and of the extent of expression of emotional feelings by the informant. Good inter-rater reliability was achieved with most measures. Some difficulties were experienced in achieving comparable thresholds for the recognition of expressed emotions.

A naturalistic study was undertaken of 36 video and audio taped interviews made by 7 different psychiatric trainees. The interviews studied were those conducted in the ordinary course of clinic work for diagnostic and therapeutic planning purposes by trainees when first seeing the parent or parents of a child newly referred to a psychiatric clinic. It was found that a directive style with specific probes and requests for detailed descriptions was associated with the obtaining of better-quality factual information than that associated with a more free-style approach. Interviewers who talked less and who made more use of open questions and checks tended to have more talkative informants. Double questions were liable to result in ambiguous answers, but multiple-choice questions did not appear to cause distortion and in some circumstances might be helpful.

Patients attending a clinic for sexually transmitted diseases (STD) were interviewed to estimate the presence of sexual dysfunction, and the GHQ-60 was used to measure psychiatric morbidity. Over one-fifth of the males and more than one-quarter of the females were experiencing sexual dysfunction problems, and the majority of them would have liked further help for their problems. The implications of the findings are discussed, and suggestions are made for dealing with these patients.

The prevalence of phobic and anxiety symptoms was investigated in school children and students aged 11–23 years by questionnaire to find age-sex trends of these symptoms.

Phobic symptoms were found more prevalent in girls except for fear of talking. Among symptoms which tended to appear in anxiety or under stress, frequency of micturition was more prevalent in boys and the remaining symptoms showed no persistent sex difference. Fear of going out of doors alone and feeling of impending death tended to decrease with age. Symptoms which peaked in adolescence (fear of blushing, fear of being looked at and most anxiety symptoms) occurred at an earlier age in girls than in boys.

While maternal overprotection appears associated with several neurotic and psychotic disorders, little is known about determinants of such a parental characteristic. Several hypotheses have been tested in a large nonclinical sample. Maternal and cultural factors seemed of greater relevance than characteristics in the child. Overprotective mothers gave evidence of marked maternal preoccupations before having children, of showing a capacity to be overprotective after the active stage of mothering, and of having personality characteristics of high anxiety, obsessionality and a need to control. Maternal overprotection appears associated with low, rather than with high maternal care. This has important primary prevention and treatment implications.

This study examined characteristics of 296 alcohol and/or drug abuse clients assigned to either (1) in-patient programmes, (2) out-patient programmes, or (3) a lower cost primary care alternative. Multivariate analysis indicated that clients admitted for in-patient care reported greater alcohol consumption and associated problems, fewer community supports and more severe symptoms such as depression and anxiety. They tended to be more frank about their problems while defence mechanisms were more apparent in clients admitted to out-patient and primary care programmes. In general, out-patients ahd more favourable prognostic indicators, such as higher social stability and lower level of alcoholic involvement. The differences among treatment programmes were along quantitative dimensions of problem severity. In particular, the alcohol dependence syndrome was a major discriminating dimension.

The marked seasonal fluctuation in suicide rates observed by Durkheim appears to be diminishing, and in some cases, to have vanished. In this study, suicide data in Britain from 1958 to 1974 were studied by auto-correlational methods. A cyclical variation was found for both men and women. Men showed a single twelve monthly cycle whereas women showed two cycles. No explanation for this difference is immediately apparent.

All consultants in general psychiatry appointed in Britain between 1 October 1975 and 30 September 1978 were sent a questionnaire asking about their training and adequacy of experience before making a final decision. Over a quarter of the respondents were women, of whom a third had trained part-time. Family circumstances and availability of part-time posts were important determinants. Overseas graduates formed another quarter. For many psychiatry was not their first love but availability of posts and status were important factors in choice of career. Many consultants felt they lacked experience in the subspecialties within psychiatry.

Thirty-four forensic specialists from the Prison Service and elsewhere rated 22 alleged signs of psychopathy in order of importance. Only two respondents did not view psychopathy as a clinical entity. The remainder recognized a large number of diagnostic signs, though with much disagreement about the exact importance of each.

This paper describes the construction of a semi-structured interview schedule to assess the burden placed on families of psychiatric patients living in the community. The Indian population studied found their sick relatives most burdensome in respect of the effect of the illness on family finances, the disruption of normal family activities and the production of stress symptoms in family members other than the patient. The inter-investigator reliability of the interview schedule proved to be high.

Arguments concerning the nature of depressive disorders have involved as a central issue the question of the bimodality or otherwise of the distribution of some variable expressing variation in symptomatology. The implications of a particular type of frequency distribution along this dimension, whether uni- or bi-modal, have been misunderstood by a number of workers, and an attempt is made to clarify the situation.

NHS consultants who are asked to accept Special Hospital patients can judge the prognosis, since the extent of both psychiatric and criminal histories provides the most accurate prediction of future behaviour. Patients discharged to the community have different outcomes from those transferred to NHS hospitals, but overall about one in five of those released are returned to a Special Hospital; up to one in two will subsequently be convicted, but the offences are mainly trivial and directed at property. Perhaps one in ten will be involved in serious or homicidal acts of violence.