Depressive thoughts were commonly reported by a sample of patients attending a south London general practitioner. Their occurrence corresponded more closely with a psychiatrist's than the general practitioner's diagnosis of depression; a ‘scale’ composed of questions about depressive thinking discriminated well between depressed and non-depressed men, but was a much poorer discriminator in the women.

The impact of the transition to parenthood for dual-earner couples was examined in a longitudinal study. Data were collected by questionnaire from couples expecting their first child, during pregnancy and after maternity leave, and from childless couples at two separate time points. The impact of the transition was minimal overall, although women experienced more pressure than men and there were some cases of extreme stress. New single-earner parents reported a greater decline in life satisfaction than dual-earners.

A structured respondent-based version of the SADS-L interview was compared with a semi-structured investigator-based version of the same interview in terms of efficiency in assessing lifetime psychopathology. There was substantial agreement across most Research Diagnostic Criteria (RDC) categories, but there was less agreement on the rating of symptoms. The implications of these similarities and differences between the techniques are discussed.

In a study of pre-morbid personality in 56 head-injured subjects, subjects' self-ratings of pre-morbid personality were compared with informants' ratings of the subjects' pre-morbid personality on two personality questionnaires (the Eysenck Personality Inventory (EPI) and the Marke-Nyman Temperament Scale (MNTS)). Correlations between self-ratings and informantratings were positive and significant for all three MNTS and for EPI Extraversion and Lie scales, but not for EPI Neuroticism, where the lack of subject-informant correlation was attributed to contamination of the self-rating of the trait measure by current abnormalities of mental state. Further analyses supported previous evidence that the MNTS ‘Validity’ scale may predict the development of psychiatric symptoms.

One-hundred-and-seventy-nine women attending their first antenatal clinic at two general practices in South London were asked to complete the 30-item General Health Questionnaire (GHQ-30) as part of a larger prospective longitudinal study into childbirth-related affective disorders. The women were later interviewed at home and a standardized psychiatric interview administered. Relative operating characteristic (ROC) curves were used to determine the optimum cut-off point on the GHQ-30. Thirty-five per cent of the women were high scorers on the GHQ-30 (≥6) and 29% were found to be ‘cases’ at interview (CIS Overall Severity Rating ≥2).