The problems which arise in the use of a psychiatric screening instrument in a language and culture other than that in which it was designed and developed are considered. An account is given of the development of a psychiatric screening questionnaire suitable for use in Chinese community samples. The questionnaire was derived from a Chinese translation of the General Health Questionnaire, with the addition of specially designed, culturally-relevant items. Discriminant function analysis was then used to select a subset of 12 items which discriminated well between ‘cases’ and ‘normals’ in the community.

Parental questionnaires identified 22% of children aged 7–12 years attending 8 general practices as psychologically deviant. Most attended for physical complaints. A comparison with general population rates showed that deviant children were over-represented among surgery attenders, particularly in the more socially advantaged areas. This finding may be explained through (1) an excess of somatic symptoms in deviant children; (2) increased parental concern about the child's health as an extension of concern about his behaviour; (3) family stress. These possibilities are discussed.

Severely handicapped psychiatric patients in long-term day care were questioned about their perceptions of their skills, motivation to perform a range of everyday tasks, current problems and coping strategies. Patients were found to respond reliably and consistently to these questions. It is argued that effective service planning must take account of patients' views of their difficulties and, in particular, of their subjective priorities.

Synopsis A case of a 37-year-old patient, 10 years after bilateral amygdalotomy and subcaudate tractotomy for chronic self-mutilation, is described. The clinical picture revealed a complex mental state, including disorders of facial recognition, social behaviour, affect and elements of the Kluver–Bucy syndrome. Mild selective deficits were demonstrated psychometrically in the recognition of familiar and unfamiliar faces. Certain features have been described in rhesus monkeys, but have not previously been reported in humans. Primate studies are discussed, with particular reference to the role of the amygdala in facial recognition.

A woman with a 5-year history of frequently recurrent depressions responded poorly to the usual antidepressants. She had a raised plasma cortisol and was made worse by progesterone or by ACTH. An oestradiol/testosterone implant every 4 months abolished all symptoms for at least 8 years, and plasma cortisol returned to normal. This case is relevant to an understanding of premenstrual syndromes and the genesis of depressive illness.

The significantly favourable changes in medical students' general attitudes to psychiatry which we found after their 8-week clerkship in psychiatry and at the end of their clinical curriculum were not maintained at the end of their first post-graduate year. Three of their specific attitudes to psychiatry changed significantly in an unfavourable direction over this 2-year period. Our findings suggest that, while favourable changes in students' specific attitudes to psychiatry can be found following a clerkship, these attitudes do not seem to endure and, in some cases, they later become less favourable. The results are discussed with reference to the relationships between undergraduate medical training in psychiatry, attitudes to psychiatry, and subsequent career choice, particularly general practice.

A Past History Schedule (PHS) for use in conjunction with the Present State Examination (PSE) is described. The PHS/PSE interview enables a rating of ‘lifetime ever’ psychopathology to be performed. It provides good inter-rater reliability, as well as a satisfactory agreement between retrospective interviews and casenote-based assessment of past psychopathology. The PHS has been devised specifically for use in a family-genetic study of affective illness, but the general approach may be applicable to other categories of psychiatric disorder.

This study describes the occurrence of self-reported perceptual phenomena in students experiencing anxiety. Phenomena like hypersensitivity to touch, hyposensitivity to taste and smell, and unusual tastes and smells appear to be non-specific and to be closely related to the level of anxiety. They emphasize the need for the development of techniques to elicit perceptual phenomena, and to investigate their occurrence and the intensity of their phenomena in variously defined groups. These also have implications for the assessment of benzodiazepine withdrawal syndromes.