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.