Many studies show that incidence and prevalence rates of schizophrenia are related to the social characteristics of the patient's environment; hypotheses—such as that of social isolation—have been invoked to account for the association, but for the most part remain unconfirmed. That the symptoms of schizophrenia or that the clinical form of the illness may also be affected by environmental factors is less clearly established. Nevertheless, some interesting observations have been made, by Benedict and Jacks (1954) and by Yap (1951) for example. Sherman and Sherman's (1934) study of delusions in a mixed American population is probably the most detailed investigation of this kind. They found that American men formulated their grandiose delusions in terms of wealth; foreign-born males did so more often in terms of literary or artistic abilities; and in negroes a religious component tended to predominate. White women were less grandiose and more paranoid than men; but in negro women the reverse was found. Hallucinations were more common in women than in men, and far more common among negroes than whites. Somatic delusions were found more frequently in white than in negro families.

Is leucotomy “one of the best treatments we have” or is it “sheer unadulterated barbarism”? These are two of the many points of view expressed to me whilst I was collecting material for this paper.

The invitation to give a commemorative lecture of such importance evokes feelings of gratitude and pleasure that a body as distinguished as your own should show interest in the work of one's collaborators. This is especially so for us because the field in which we work might seem, to superficial observation, to be remote from practical interests. It has long been our hope that by study of a relatively simple animal we might be able to discover some of the fundamental features of living memory systems, which have not yielded to investigation in mammals or man. Your interest encourages us to think that we may be on the right lines and I hope that in return it may be possible to tell you at least something of the principles that underlie the coding and storing of information in the nervous system. But the brain is a very complicated instrument and the problem is far from solution. The account that I shall give will be grossly over-simplified and will probably seem to present an absurdly static picture of what we all know to be a continually active and dynamic system.

The more recent and better designed studies of the reliability of psychiatric diagnosis (Schmidt and Fonda, 1956; Norris, 1959; Kreitman, 1961; Kreitman et al. 1961) suggest that the earlier pessimism may not be entirely justified. At the present time it seems safest to conclude that there are some states that some psychiatrists can diagnose reasonably reliably under some conditions. Nevertheless, even if psychiatrists could be shown to be highly reliable under optimal conditions, their diagnoses could only serve as the criterion by which to develop some more objective, public and quantitative means of classification, since the optimal conditions cannot readily be met in routine practice. It is desirable that any such quantitative scale should be reasonably compatible with existing psychiatric classification. As Eysenck (1960) has argued, “the degree of correspondence observed is of some interest in making possible the translation of experimental findings from one field to the other…. Even if there were no correspondence at all with psychiatric diagnostic classifications, this would not in any way invalidate the empirical findings”.

A hundred years ago it was generally believed by the medical profession, and particularly by alienists, that masturbation was an important and frequent cause of mental disorder. Today no one believes this; and the masturbatory hypothesis (as we may call it) has in all probability been finally abandoned. If we enquire into the history of this change we find, somewhat surprisingly, that medical references to the harmfulness of masturbation are vanishingly rare before the 18th century. For practical purposes, the whole history of the masturbatory hypothesis is contained within the last 250 years. This history is not one in which the present-day psychiatrist is apt to feel much pride. Yet it is worth studying, not only for its own sake (and the history of psychiatric ideas is a much neglected subject), but also for the light it throws on the peculiar difficulty of refuting causal hypotheses in psychiatry. The aim of the present essay is, first, to give a short history of the idea that masturbation is an important cause of mental disorder and, second, to examine some of the reasons for the rise and fall of this idea and why it persisted for so long (1).

The “mnestic syndromes” proper belong to the class of “organic syndromes” of which they are a more or less ill defined sub-group. Though memory disturbances do occur in psychogenic disorders, the mnestic syndrome has in relation to these only a differential diagnostic significance. Disturbances of memory may, of course, appear in other organic syndromes, but only when memory defects are the dominant clinical feature or the sole defect (probably quite rare) should one speak of the “mnestic syndrome”. A number of sub-types or syndromes, e.g. the so-called Korsakov syndrome, are contained in the mnestic syndrome. As the syndrome may show various types of amnesia, dysmnesia or hypermnesia, the term “mnestic syndrome” was suggested rather than “amnestic syndrome” (Conrad, 1953).

This is an attempt to describe a clinical syndrome which has hitherto received very little attention. It is widespread in Africa and has important medicolegal implications.

The trainee psychiatrist usually looks upon patients' relatives as a nuisance. Later, he realizes that an essential part of psychiatric treatment is to mitigate the effects of the patient's illness on his family, and to protect him from injudicious interventions on the part of his friends. Finally, it may occur to him that the patient's illness might be causally linked with recent or past psychological disturbances of close associates. A review of recent researches into the relationship between illnesses of individual patients and psychological disturbances in the people around them (Post and Wardle, 7) revealed that much of the work was inconclusive, largely because the investigators had been prematurely preoccupied with some theoretical issues of interpersonal psychiatry. It was, therefore, decided to approach the subject from a practical, clinical angle.

There have been abundant studies of dreams from the point of view of their content, but few have examined the mode of dreams irrespective of content. For analysing and interpreting the content of dreams first-hand accounts have been used, but these verbalizations—owing to communication limitations alone—are far from identical with the dream experience. These verbalizations necessarily lump together the elements of the experience in order to provide a coherent description.

In the clinical evaluation of new drugs, many investigators employ a simple crossover design, where half of the patients first receive the active drug for a given period of time, followed by a switch to an inert placebo for a similar period of time; the other half of the patients begin the trial on placebo, and are subsequently switched to the active drug. When the criterion measure consists of an over-all rating of, say, “Improved” or “Non-Improved”, the data lend themselves to a chi-square analysis. It is clear, however, that in many clinical circles, this analytic technique is being consistently misused, despite the fact that the various pitfalls and underlying assumptions have been widely emphasized (Lewis and Burke, 3). The purpose of this brief note is to demonstrate the proper use of chi-square, and also to show that, when incorrectly used, the clinical research investigator may increase the probability of prematurely discarding an effective drug.

Dementia, of several types, has long been known as one of the possible fates of the alcoholic. Since Gigon and Odermatt (1925) and Shattuck (1928) called attention to the likeness between alcoholic polyneuritis and that found in beriberi evidence has accumulated of the part played by lack of B vitamins. It is now accepted that Wernicke's encephalopathy is identical with cerebral beriberi (de Wardener and Lennox, 1947) and results primarily from a deficiency of thiamine. The same brain lesions are found in Wernicke's encephalopathy and Korsakov's psychosis, allowing for the length of the illness (e.g., Victor et al., 1952; Malamud and Skillicorn, 1956) and Victor and Adams (1961) consider that Korsakov's psychosis in alcoholics is the psychic manifestation of Wernicke's encephalopathy.

Following the socio-psychiatric surveys on the Chinese population in three communities from 1946 to 1948 (Lin, 1953), similar studies were carried out in Taiwan (Formosa) from 1949 to 1953 on four aboriginal tribes. The purpose of these studies was to investigate the characteristic features of mental disorders among the aborigines and the relationship of the occurrence of mental illness to their differential levels of social development. The present paper reports the main results of the comparative psychiatric surveys on 11,442 aborigines distributed among tribal groups of different levels of acculturation.