608 is a Community Mental Health Centre (CMHC) in Waltham Forest Health District which came into service in February 1983. It serves a catchment area in North East London of approximately 95,000, and caters primarily for the 16 to 65 age group. It is linked with the services provided by a large psychiatric hospital—Claybury—which has been scheduled for closure by 1993. Planning is now under way to provide alternative services in each of the five districts covered by the hospital.

Explanations of the over-representation of black psychiatric patients under the Mental Health Act tend to emphasise either the particular psychopathology of black patients or alternatively to locate it within the decisions of individual psychiatrists and police in a racist society. Both contain specific (conspiratorial) and general (cultural) variants. The two models are incomplete in themselves.

Microcomputers are increasingly being used in psychiatry for a variety of purposes. When used in computer-patient ‘interviews’ they have generally proved acceptable—indeed popular—with psychiatric patients. Automated psychological assessment is one form of computer-patient interview that is attracting much interest. Some of the early applications were with elderly patients. Kendrick has expressed doubts regarding this application with the current generation of elderly people, suggesting that their relative unfamiliarity with computers and video games might cause difficulties.

Liaison psychiatry has been an influential element in hospital psychiatric practice for over a decade now. It is concerned with the ‘diagnosis, treatment, study, and prevention of psychiatric disorders among patients in non-psychiatric health care institutions, especially in general hospitals’. This paper describes and evaluates a project in which the principles of liaison psychiatry were incorporated into a psychogeriatric service.

After 30 years of psychiatry in England I've just had a cold plunge through Canadian psychiatry as a staffman in an Ontario general hospital. Because science is international and a good many British psychiatrists work in Canada I expected clinical practice to be the same: but psychiatry is different on the two sides of the Atlantic. Before my raw, insistent perceptions of these differences fade, as they do so quickly when one adapts to a new life, I will write some of them down. However faulty they form a rough mirror in which we can all examine our own professional faces.

Psychiatric disorder is a common complication of mental handicap. Whilst there are few detailed studies of psychiatric morbidity in mentally handicapped people, recent epidemiological surveys indicate that approximately 50% of mentally handicapped people in hospital and in contact with services in the community have suffered from psychiatric symptoms or behavioural problems sufficient to require specialist advice. All forms of psychiatric disorder are seen although the pattern differs somewhat from that in the general population and there is a high frequency of behaviour disorders.

Members write to the College asking for guidance on planning services for psychiatric patients, and in particular on the desirable level of provision of hospital beds. At the request of the Executive and Finance Committee I am publishing the following information, based on a letter that I wrote to Regional Advisers.

Unfortunately the version of ‘Criteria for Consultant Posts in Psychiatry’ which appeared in the August 1986 Bulletin was out of date. The version agreed in 1985, which coincides with that included in the JCHPT Handbook 1985, and which is currently circulated to Assessors on Advisory Appointment Committees, is as to follows:

1. Before appointment to a Consultant post, whether in general psychiatry or one of the other psychiatric special ties, a candidate should normally have undertaken a basic training in psychiatry and hold the MRCPsych or equivalent qualification. If there is an outstanding candidate, or circumstances are highly exceptional, other relevant qualifications and experience may constitute an acceptable alternative.

2. The successful candidate should normally have reached the age of 32, but there is no bar to the appointment of younger applicants.

3. Due weight should be attached to breadth of experience, participation in organised rotation schemes, periods spent abroad in relevant posts, and work in medical fieldsallied to psychiatry.

This is considered to be one of the foremost academic distinctions in psychiatry. The Prize, value £500, is awarded on the results of an annual examination, which will be held next in May/June 1987. Candidates should be qualified medical officers with a minimum of two years' service in mental hospitals or clinics in psychiatry in the United Kingdom or elsewhere in the British Commonwealth; they should be between 23 and 35 years of age and possess the MRCPsych or any other degree or diploma in psychological medicine.