A questionnaire was developed to elicit medical students' attitudes to psychiatry. All 94 second year clinical students at a London teaching hospital completed the instrument before and after an 8-week psychiatric clerkship. Although two-thirds of the sample had mixed feelings about psychiatry initially, by the end of the clerkship the students' general attitude to psychiatry had changed significantly in a favourable direction. Analysis of 18 specific attitudes to psychiatry revealed that the students' first responses showed anticipatory bias and lack of uniformity. Later, however, only two specific attitudes had changed significantly: more students agreed that ‘problems presented by psychiatric patients are often particularly interesting and challenging’, and more of them disagreed with the statement that ‘psychiatric patients, generally speaking, are not easy to like’. The sexes differed on one attitude; more males than females agreed that “psychiatry is too inexact; it seems to lack a proper scientific basis”. Finally, the proportion of students who considered the possibility of specializing in psychiatry rose from 6 to 17% during the clerkship. The students' reasons for or against such a career are discussed.

The question of where to place the chronically mentally disabled in the community is essential in this era of brief hospitalization practices. This report examines the effects of the social conditions of the environment on the length of stay in the community for a sample of 119 multiple admission schizophrenics in New York City. Patients returned to a variety of family and non-family living arrangements in poor and depressed areas of the city. The relationship between characteristics of the living arrangements and the patients' clinical functioning and rate of rehospitalization was examined. The findings show that there is no significant differential effect of the type of living arrangement on rehospitalization or clinical functioning, and that these factors did not contribute significantly to the prediction of successful adjustment. However, the socio-emotional characteristics of the environment - i.e. social support and interpersonal stress - together are stronger predictors of outcome than are available out-patient treatment programmes. The findings emphasize the importance of environmental variables as factors independent of the effect of treatment on rehospitalization.

Classification and diagnosis are concepts of fundamental importance in medicine. Yet all too frequently in published papers the only measure of performance of a classification rule is the optimistic apparent error rate. This is defined, some real examples are given illustrating how poor it is as an estimate of true future performance, and alternative measures are suggested.

The General Health Questionnaire (GHQ) was shown to be a valid instrument for the screening of psychological impairment in a defined population of Yugoslav students. Optimal indices of validity were obtained by the use of the 60-item version of the GHQ and a cut-off score of 13/14. The product-moment correlation coefficients between clinical ratings of severity of mental impairment and GHQ scores ranged from 0·71 to 0·78.

This is a preliminary investigation of admissions to a district general hospital psychiatric unit over a two-year period, in which patterns of psychiatric diagnoses in Jewish and non-Jewish patients were compared. Among the Jews there were significantly more patients with affective psychoses and fewer with schizophrenia than among the non-Jews. The methodological problems arising in such a study and some possible aetiological factors are discussed.