I should like to express my appreciation and gratitude to the fellows and members of our new College for placing me in the position in which I now stand. The Presidency is the greatest honour our Royal College can confer and the first occupant of the office sets out lacking guidelines or landmarks, without precedents or hallowed practices to constrain or cushion him. He will be expected to lead a democratically elected body of men towards their chosen objectives without falling prey to the dizziness or sense of grandeur that are prone at a height to deceive the senses. I am deeply conscious of the privilege, responsibility and the opportunities for advancing the discipline to which we are dedicated that are afforded by the Presidential office. I can only say that they will always have the first claim on such energies and talents as I am able to command.

Various characteristics of residents of a large hospital for the mentally handicapped were investigated in order to find any associations between these characteristics and the frequency of visiting by parents. The findings suggest that early attachment of the parents to the subjects is of more importance for visiting than present skills and behaviour. The most frequently visited subjects were more likely to recognize people, have some speech and have had a normal appearance as a baby. The unvisited subjects were more likely to have been born with an abnormal appearance and into homes with pre-existing social and emotional problems.

Psychiatry and psychopharmacology are no longer aiming to make a decisive breakthrough at the end of the century. Rather than seeking explanations, research workers are looking for ‘predictions’. Three main types of prediction are emerging: a tautological, a heuristic, and an irrelevant one. Few predictions found in the recent literature can be marked as ‘logical’ ones. Nevertheless, predictions play two important roles: they generate new hypotheses that can be falsified in properly designed scientific experiments; they also may serve to falsify given hypotheses. The main recent findings on predictions in psychiatry are briefly summarised.