The recent technological explosion in the advancement of brain imaging, resulting in MRI, SPECT and PET scanning, has served to further blur the interfaces of neurology, neurosurgery and psychiatry. As proposed by Reynolds (1990), the traditional divergence of classical neurological science and psychiatry, originating from Cullen's description of ‘neurosis’, is currently changing to convergence and in many areas coalescing.

It has been said that there is little likelihood of risk contact between people with learning disabilities in institutions and HIV infected people in the community and also that the shift of patients with learning disabilities from large institutions towards the community does not augur well for the prevention of HIV infection. There is little evidence for either of these views.

As we have previously mentioned, the computer itself is simply a collection of chips and circuit boards which are useless without software. Application software is what you do work with, i.e. your word processor or database etc, but the application software itself needs an operating system to run within. The operating system, however, needs something called a basic input/output system (BIOS) to operate. This is software but stored in ROM (Read Only Memory) on chips, and tells the computer what to do when it is first switched on.

In 1945 general psychiatric care in France was still mainly centred on large public and private institutions built, for the most part, in the 19th century and which had embodied, as their basic philosophy, the isolation and detention of the mentally ill.

An experiment in community care, training Omanis with bachelor degrees in social work, psychology and education to act as psychiatric care givers in the community, is currently being developed in the Sultanate of Oman. This experiment is based on the Alma-Ata declaration to achieve Health For All by the Year 2000 (WHO, 1978) and WHO aspirations to move psychiatric care back into the community (WHO, 1990), and the fact that in many developing countries psychiatric care has remained on the fringe due to lack of resources and manpower.

The need to confine and restrain psychotic patients at the turn of the last century saw the building of a few large asylums which soon became overcrowded with the growth of the population. These asylums were the only service available to the mentally ill until 1959 when the trend to decentralise began with the building of general hospital psychiatric units.

It did not take me long to find that I belonged to the ‘marginal’ section of Norwegian society. Both as foreigner and psychiatrist I seemed to be a threat. Nevertheless it is from society's marginal groups that healers have often come (Miller, 1987) and so I continue to work with a necessary and natural cultural naivety and therapeutic optimism! I present here an overview and critique of the services provided for children in Oslo from the privileged position of a migrant. The high staffing levels and the profile of child and adolescent psychiatry appear to have exaggerated the ‘psychologising’ of problems and a search for therapy. These have the potential to inflame both interprofessional conflicts and interdisciplinary conflicts because of the emphasis on therapeutic skills to the relative exclusion of a relevant knowledge base.