The question at issue now, as it was in 1954 when Meehl's book Clinical versus Statistical Prediction was published, is how may we best, most accurately and most efficiently predict the socially, clinically, and theoretically significant characteristics and behaviours of our patients. In the introduction to his book Meehl said ‘My thesis in a nutshell: there is no convincing reason to assume that explicitly formalized mathematical rules and the clinician's creativity are equally suited for any given kind of task, or that their comparative effectiveness is the san*e for different tasks. Current clinical practice should be much more critically examined with this in mind than it has been.’

The present study of a correlation between stature of male psychiatric patients and character disorder as well as criminality has been made on the background of the findings of such a correlation in persons with the XYY syndrome by Jacobs et al. (1965), Casey et al (1966), Price et al. (1966 and 1967), Welch et al. (1967), Bardett et al. (1968), Court Brown et al (1968), Hunter (1968), Nielsen (1968) and Wiener et al. (1968), and to a certain extent also in persons with a large Y chromosome (Nielsen, 1968). These findings indicate that males with two Y chromosomes, and probably also males with a large Y chromosome, have a higher disposition to tall stature, character disorder and criminality than is found in the general male population. There might be a Y-linked inheritance of tall stature, character disorder and criminality irrespective of the size of the Y chromosome. If these hypotheses are true, one would expect to find a higher frequency of patients with character disorder and criminality among males with a stature above 181 cm. compared with males below 181 cm., and the present study has been made in order to compare the frequency of character disorder and criminality in psychiatric patients in these two stature groups.

It has been reported that delinquents of superior intelligence differ from those of average and below average intelligence in their psychological, social, criminal and educational characteristics (Burt, 1944; Simmons, 1956 and 1962; Caplan and Powell, 1964; Cowie et al., 1968). Simmons has suggested that bright delinquents are more likely to be emotionally disturbed. He describes the boys at an Approved School for highly intelligent boys as suffering generally from ‘deep emotional disturbance’, and maintains that ‘the emotional disturbances which turn an intelligent child into a delinquent have usually been far more severe than they would have been in a less intelligent, less sensitive one’.

The premenstrual syndrome first described by Frank (1931) includes a number of psychological and physical symptoms appearing in the week before menstruation and relieved by the onset of the period. The aetiology is still obscure.

There have been many studies (3,15,4) on the effects of oral contraceptive hormonal agents, though relatively few have concerned themselves with the possible adverse emotional reactions accompanying their use. To date, seven women (8, 6, 5, 13) have had psychotic episodes in temporal association with drug use, one patient having reported two such episodes. Four of these seven women had a history of severe postpartum disturbance in the past, and two others had previous psychiatric illness. There have been reports of varying incidence of depression, anxiety, increased or decreased sexual desire and relief of premenstrual tension. We wish to present data from a pilot double blind study of one combination oral contraceptive.

The aim of this study was to examine the relationships between side effects occurring in the first two months of treatment with a contraceptive pill and questionnaire-assessed neuroticism. Because the side effects of contraceptive pills are now widely known, doctors' and patients' expectations could be a significant influence in reporting side effects. In order to control for these non-pharmacological variables we therefore designed a double blind trial of a contraceptive and an inert pill involving an intensive study of a small group of patients. It was assumed that neurotic patients were more likely to report side effects, but that if the degree of neuroticism could be controlled, any significant differences in reports of side effects would be due to the active substance.

The possibility of abnormalities in carbohydrate metabolism in schizophrenia has been stressed by many authors (Mann 1925, Freeman et al., 1943, Braceland et al., 1945, Morgan and Pilgrim 1952, Henneman et al., 1954, Moya et al., 1958, Lingjaerde and Skaug 1959). As there is a close relation between lipid metabolism (in terms of plasma free fatty acids, FFA) and glucose metabolism Mueller (1961, 1962) tested the FFA-response to insulin-induced hypoglycaemia in chronic schizophrenic patients. He found that schizophrenics showed less reduction in FFA-values than healthy controls, in some cases even an increase. Results were later presented which tend to confirm Mueller's data (van Sickle et al., 1966). Interest was focused on increased sympathetic activity in the patients, and infusion experiments with epinephrine (van Sickle et al., 1966) and norepinephrine (Cardon and Mueller 1964) were performed without producing conclusive results.

Considerable interest is at present focused on the possibility of an association between mental illness in epileptics and metabolic abnormalities resulting from the anticonvulsant drugs they have been taking; in fact it has been suggested that these drug-induced abnormalities may be actually causative of the psychiatric disorders. For a good summary of this literature the interested reader is referred to Reynolds (1968).

The results from a small series of persons suffering from alcoholism suggested that the amounts of water and electrolytes in their brains (obtained post mortem) differed from those of control and depressed individuals (Shaw, Frizel, Camps and White, 1969). Since publishing this work we have analysed brain tissue from a further series of alcoholic subjects, and in this paper we compare these findings with the original data from control and depressed groups.

From time to time patients come to one who have had years of unsuccessful psychotherapy and are in desperate need of help. To undertake the treatment of such patients is to face many difficulties. Understandably they are suspicious of the new therapist; it will not do if he reminds them of the one who disillusioned them, but if they come to like or trust him they may feel that they are being disloyal to their first therapist, to whom they still have some attachment. If they notice improvement in their condition it gives them no pleasure, for they know that they have relapsed after appearing to improve in the past. On the other hand, any setback upsets them greatly; they are convinced that they will never get well, and blame either the therapist or themselves or both. They have been made to feel that analysis is the only worthwhile therapy, and that there must be something quite specially wrong with them if it cannot help them as it has helped others; so their depression and sense of failure are reinforced. Often it is not only their psychological condition but also their realistic situation that has deteriorated, sometimes beyond repair.

The word ‘yoga’ is very old and occurs in early Upanishads like the Katha and the Svetasvatara as well as in Mahabharata but it was Patañjali who attempted for the first time to offer a complete system in his Yoga-Sutra. Authorities differ as regards the exact time of the composition of the Yoga-Sutra. According to some it was written in the second century b.c., whereas others believe that it was composed as late as the fourth century a.d.

The reports on the emotional reactions and adjustment of patients to chronic haemodialysis are often contradictory; nevertheless, all agree that this treatment is stressful.

A programme was undertaken to study the attitudes of visitors to mental hospitals. Initially a series of individual non-directive tape-recorded interviews were conducted on a small sample of visitors, who freely discussed various topics, including staff attitude, visiting problems and difficulties in having a mentally ill relative. A provisional questionnaire was constructed from the significant points of the recorded interviews and was used on another sample of visitors in a pilot study, on the basis of which a final ‘multiple choice’ questionnaire was designed incorporating 28 items. Copies of the final questionnaire were then distributed from the wards of two mental hospitals to consecutive visitors, with a stamped envelope addressed to Nottingham University, informing them that the study was in connection with an independent survey. The distribution continued until few new visitors attended. Of the two hospitals, the first, The Pastures (Hospital A), serves a wide county catchment area and has an ‘unrestricted visiting hours' policy; the second, Kingsway (Hospital B), on the other hand, has a ‘limited visiting hours' policy and serves a compact urban catchment area. Altogether 510 questionnaires (75 per cent) were returned completed, 306 (8o per cent) for Hospital A and 204 (70 per cent) for Hospital B at the end of the study. The rest of the paper is confined to the analysis of these 510 questionnaires in relation to the question on the effect of unrestricted visiting, which has already been studied by Barton et al., from the nurses' point of view. The particular question asked by us was, 'some hospitals allow visitors to visit at any convenient time. What effect do you think this would have on (1) the patients, (2) the visitors, (3) the nursing staff, (4) the doctors?’ The replies were to be given on a five point scale for each question. The scale was ‘Very good-Good-No effect-Poor-Very poor.’ the graded adjectives being determined from the earlier tape-recordings.

It is generally assumed that depressions are accompanied by sleep disturbances. We have combined staff objective ratings and patients' subjective responses to study sleep in depressed and hypomanic or manic patients. We report on ten nights only, because during that period all patients were on placebo medication.

Many of the links in the chain of circumstances leading to anorexia nervosa are still not clear. Ever since Sir William Gull in 1868 first described and in, 874 named the condition, investigators have put most of the blame for it on psychological circumstances, such as an adverse relationship between mother and daughter. Tolstrup (1967), after reviewing the observations of a long list of authors, concluded that no physical explanation of note was forth-coming. Another of the many adherents of the psychogenetic school is Thomä (1961).

The Regional Poisoning Treatment Centre of the Royal Infirmary, Edinburgh, under Dr. Henry Matthew, is located in the only locked ward in the hospital. Not only patients suffering from selfpoisoning are admitted, but also patients under police surveillance, emergency psychiatric admissions and patients with ‘delirium tremens'.