The case of a person with severe mental handicap whose pica became uncontrollable during episodes of depressive illness Is described. Treatment of the depression with lofepramine markedly reduced the pica, and withdrawal of lofepramine led to recurrence. It is suggested that biological symptoms of depression should be monitored in people with severe mental handicap who show significant episodic worsening of long-standing repetitive behaviour.

We report a patient with unilateral right auditory hallucinations in association with prominent right-sided hearing impairment and poor performance in neuropsychological tests sensitive to frontal-lobe damage.

We believe the case of a boy whose mother insisted he was psychotic is the first report considering psychiatric illness in a child as part of the Munchausen's syndrome by proxy (MSP) complex.

We have presented a case of folie à deux in which the wife was the primary (dominant) partner and the husband the secondary (submissive) partner. The husband's symptoms seemed to have resolved as his dependency shifted from his wife back to his mother. Treatment is recommended by deliberately shifting dependencies only when there is advantage in doing so. For most patients, the aim should be independence.

Anorexic end bulimic women overestimate their body sizes substantially more than comparison women, but little is known about the factors that influence this overestimation. This study examined the influence of media portrayal of idealised female bodies in women's fashion magazines. Comparison women were not affected by the nature of the photographs that they saw, but eating-disordered women were - they overestimated more when they had seen the pictures of women than when they saw photographs of neutral objects.

In a study of 23 diabetic men complaining of impotence, completion of physical tests, self-report psychometric testing, a rating of marital intimacy, and a semistructured interview revealed that, of ten patients found to be at risk of psychogenic impotence secondary to marital or psychiatric morbidity, five were thought to have adequate erectile response and to have a psychogenic component to their problem. This seems to show high sensitivity, if not specificity, of the selfreport questionnaires.