Indecent exposure is the second commonest sexual offence in England and Wales. The offenders responsible usually fall into the clinical group known as exhibitionists. Exhibitionism is one of the less well understood sexual disorders, and is virtually confined to males. It is characterized by the urge to expose the genitals to members of the opposite sex in a more or less public situation.

The sexual asphyxias have, in the past, often been described by forensic pathologists after an apparently accidental death has brought the condition to light. The following case is exceptional in that it came to light before a fatality occurred and suggests that intense self-punitive tendencies may play a part in some cases.

The growing adoption (1) of unilateral non-dominant ECT in place of the classical bilateral technique requires the accurate identification of the dominant hemisphere; the following simple method appears to be an improvement on those previously described (2) (3).

The production of a catatonic-like state in animals by phenothiazines and related compounds (‘experimental catatonia’) is an important laboratory test in the assessment of neuroleptics (Joyce, 1968). This response is, however, uncommon in humans who are receiving therapeutic doses of this type of drug. Such a case is described, and some of the literature concerning this subject is reviewed.

This study has arisen out of the work of the Newcastle group (Kiloh and Garside, 1963; Kay et al., 1969) and that of the London group (Kendell, 1968) on the forms of depressive illness. In the present investigation, unlike those mentioned, a subjective approach was employed; that is, what the patients actually reported about themselves rather than a psychiatric appraisal of the patient was used as the data. A similar approach was employed by Pilowsky, Levine and Boulton (1969) in their taxonomic study of depression. The object of this paper is firstly, to investigate the systematic and the taxonomy of depressive phenomena; secondly to look at this taxonomy in depressive illness and non-depressive illness patients; and thirdly to investigate the psychiatrist's notion of the endogenous-reactive dichotomy within this taxonomy. Essentially the question is whether there is a continuum of depression, at one pole being reactive depression and at the other pole endogenous depression or whether these two classical diagnoses represent separate empirical entities. The former view is taken by the London workers and the latter by the Newcastle workers. In a recent review article, Eysenck (1970) favoured the binary or separate entity model, although he suggests that both views of depressive illness are over simplistic in their formulations.

Delusions of poisoning often dominate the clinical picture in schizophrenia. In an earlier publication (6) we have suggested that these cases may be phenomenologically distinct from other schizophrenics. Patients who believed they were poisoned or gassed reported more somatic symptoms, headaches, decreased visual acuity and disturbances of taste and smell.