Acute stress responses were investigated in head injured (N = 38) and non-head injured (N = 38) motor vehicle accident victims immediately following their trauma. Results indicated that amnesia of the traumatic event was associated with less acute post-traumatic stress, intrusive symptoms, perceived injury, and fear of future risk. A proportion of head injured patients reported intrusive and avoidance symptoms despite being amnesic of their trauma. Findings are discussed in terms of the differential post-traumatic adjustment of head injured and non-head injured traumatized patients.

Data were collected on a consecutive 6 month sample of women aged 15–44 years attending their catchment area Casualty Department because of parasuicide. Information included age and childbirth within the previous year. Using this information and catchment area data on population size and births, an odds ratio for parasuicide in postnatal as compared to nonpostnatal women was calculated. Five of 131 study subjects had delivered a baby in the previous 12 months. The odds ratio was calculated to be 0·43 (95% confidence interval 0·17–0·95). These findings suggest that the rate of parasuicide in the first postnatal year is low despite the high rate of psychiatric morbidity at this time. The result supports previous findings on suicide and suggests that postnatal women, despite their high rates of psychiatric disorder, are protected against fatal and non-fatal self harm. The implications for postnatal and suicide prevention services are discussed.

The study was carried out in two groups of massively obese women with BMI values who were to undergo bariatric surgery. The patients were evaluated for weight variability and for the presence and the frequency of binge eating. Body composition, resting energy expenditure (REE) and metabolic parameters were also measured. When non-bingeing individuals were compared with patients who met Binge Eating Disorder criteria, no differences in body composition, fat distribution, REE values and concentrations of serum lipids, insulin and thyroid hormones were found. On the other hand, weight variability due to reduced diet in the subjects' lifetime was significantly higher. This study does not support the hypothesis that in massively obese women binge eating is somehow induced by a reduced energy expenditure.

We examined for risk factors for suicide among psychiatric in-patients by comparing 37 in-patients from an Ontario Provincial Psychiatric Hospital who had committed suicide with 37 age and sex matched in-patient controls. Significantly more of the suicide victims had made a previous suicide attempt (62·2 v. 35·1%), suffered from schizophrenia (75·7 v. 35·1%), were involuntary at their last admission (70·3 v. 43·2%) and lived alone (70·3 v. 43·2%). Only six patients committed suicide on the ward. Almost a third of the patients, the majority schizophrenic, committed suicide after having been in the hospital for more than a year. These results suggest that in the psychiatric hospital setting the in-patient at risk for suicide has previously exhibited suicidal behaviour, suffers from schizophrenia, was admitted involuntarily, lives alone and that the risk of suicide may remain high among long-stay schizophrenics.

Previous studies have suggested that schizophrenia is characterized by an asymmetry of visuo-spatial attention, in particular that acute unmedicated schizophrenics demonstrate relative inattention to right hemispace, whereas chronically medicated patients demonstrate the opposite pattern. In the present study, 30 unmedicated schizophrenic patients, 32 chronically medicated schizophrenic patients, 30 patients suffering from major depression and 60 healthy controls were assessed using two measures of hemispatial attentional neglect, namely letter and star cancellation. The results demonstrated that the chronic schizophrenic group made more total omissions for star cancellation (in both right and left hemispace), but that there was no difference between the groups in terms of omission asymmetry for either letter or star cancellation.

The present study investigated the relationship between anxiety, as measured by the State-Trait Inventory (Spielberger, 1983) and interrogative suggestibility, as measured by the Gudjonsson Suggestibility Scale (GSS 2, Gudjonsson, 1987). One hundred and sixty-one suspects detained at two English police stations for questioning were assessed prior to being interviewed by the police. Unexpectedly, trait anxiety correlated more consistently with suggestibility than did state anxiety. The correlations were consistently higher among the Caucasian than the Afro-Caribbean subjects and the Afro-Caribbean subjects were significantly more suggestible than the Caucasian subjects even after their GSS 2 memory and IQ scores had been controlled for. The main practical implications of the findings are that interrogative suggestibility cannot be easily evaluated from the person's self-reported anxiety and the situation in which people are assessed may influence the relationship between these psychological variables.

Retrograde amnesia for autobiographical material in the absence of anterograde amnesia or other memory disturbances was found in a patient with acute viral encephalitis. Memory loss showed a temporal gradient, but new learning was spared. Both brain perfusion imaging with 99mTc-HMPAO SPECT, and EEG localized the lesion in the left temporal lobe while CT and MRI were normal. This observation supports the anatomical differentiation between the different memory functions. The uncommon combination of isolated retrograde amnesia without other neuropsychological findings may raise the doubt of psychogenic aetiology, which in this case was refuted.