This memorandum is concerned with manpower needs for psychotherapy. Discussion will be principally concerned with the consultant grade and its associated career structure, but reference will be made to other sources of psychotherapeutic manpower.

Its recommendations should be regarded as supplementing those in the College’s previous memorandum, submitted to the Central Manpower Committee in 1973, on the level of medical staffing needed to achieve acceptable standards of psychiatric care for ‘mental illness’ only.

Reading in psychiatry, psychology and associated areas in the 1970s reveals some almost permanent features and also considerable change and movement. Familiar established textbooks must preserve character while modernizing content. The two principal texts each now lack the former principal author. Clinical Psychiatry by E. Slater and M. Roth (3rd edn 1969, Baillière Tindall, £8.50) remains the great English-language textbook in the European clinical and organic tradition. The psychobiological approach of Henderson and Gillespie’s Textbook of Psychiatry continues in the 10th edition (1969, Oxford University Press, £2.80 pbk) revised and partly rewritten by I. R. G. Batchelor. Tredgold’s Mental Retardation by R. Tredgold and K. Soddy (nth edn 1970, Baillière Tindall, £6) retains the importance first established in 1908. Shorter textbooks have appeared more recently. Psychological Medicine : An Introduction to Psychiatry by D. Curran, M. Partridge and P. Storey (7th edn 1972, Churchill Livingstone, £3.25) is clear, direct, even didactic and rather short on psychodynamics. Psychiatry by E. W. Anderson and W. H. Trethowan (3rd edn 1973, Baillière Tindall, £2.20) is concise, comprehensive but unlively reading. Psychiatry for Students by D. Stafford-Clark (4th edn 1974, Allen & Unwin, £2.65 pbk) is an easily read book featuring ‘people, not cases’. New short texts complementing the formal textbooks are Key to Psychiatry: A Textbook for Students by M. J. Sainsbury (1974, Harvey Miller & Medcalf, £3.85) and Psychological Medicine for Students by J. Pollitt (1973, Churchill Livingstone, £1.50 pbk). Essential Principles of Psychiatry by S. Crown (1970, Pitman) and U.C.H. Notes on Psychiatry, edited by R. Tredgold and H. Wolff (1975, Duckworth, £7.50; £2.95 pbk) are ‘house journals’ of London medical schools found useful elsewhere also. More ambitious are two recent Edinburgh productions, both edited by A. Forrest: New Perspectives in Mental Handicap (1973, Churchill Livingstone, £2.50), multidisciplinary but without a psychologist; and Companion to Psychiatric Studies Vols. 1 and 2 (1973, Churchill Livingstone, £10) intended principally for graduate students preparing for specialist examinations but also a refresher of knowledge for working psychiatrists. From the United States Modem Clinical Psychiatry by L. C. Kolb (8th edn 1973, W. B. Saunders, £7.20) is beautifully written, notably emphasizing the psychodynamic approach. Recent Advances in Clinical Psychiatry by K. Granville-Grossman (1971, Churchill Livingstone, £3.75) contains recent work on functional psychoses, drug and alcoholic dependence, phobic states, organic brain disease and the psychiatry of pregnancy and the puerperium, excellently presented. Granville-Grossman gives a chapter to the diagnosis of schizophrenia. Wide discrepancies in national incidences of schizophrenia raise doubts as to whether diagnostic criteria also vary. Psychiatric Diagnosis in New York and London : A Comparative Study of Mental Hospital Admissions, by J. E. Cooper, R. E. Kendell, B. J. Gurland, L. Sharpe, J. R. M. Copeland and R. Simon (1972, Oxford University Press, £3) is an elegant comparative study of diagnosis of the same patients by psychiatric teams from these two cities; while such disparity exists international statistics have dubious value.