Most in vivo studies of striatal D2 receptor (SD2R) density with positron emission tomography in schizophrenia have attempted to relate this variable to the diagnosis of the illness. In the present study, a relationship between SD2R and clinical dimensions of this psychosis was searched for in a highly selected group of young negative schizophrenics (8 drug-naïve and 2 drug-free). The SD2R density index measured in vivo using 76Br-bromolisuride and PET correlated negatively (r = 0.80, P < 0.01) with a psychomotor dimension of schizophrenia involving blunted affect and alogia. The mean SD2R index of the patients did not differ from that of age-matched control subjects. Therefore, this behavioural dimension accounts for the variance of the SD2R, suggesting that the striatal dopamine system modulates symptoms such as flattened affect and alogia.

Depressive personality and depressive illness are examined from an evolutionary adaptationist standpoint. It is postulated that the depressive state evolved in relation to social competition, as an unconscious, involuntary losing strategy, enabling the individual to accept defeat in ritual agonistic encounters and to accommodate to what would otherwise be unacceptably low social rank.

Regional cerebral blood flow was measured with H215O positron emission tomography in four patients with obsessive–compulsive disorder. Patients were scanned on 12 occasions in the same session, with each scan paired with brief exposure to one of a hierarchy of contaminants that elicited increasingly intense urges to ritualise. The relationship between symptom intensity and regional cerebral blood flow (rCBF; an index of neural activity) was subsequently examined in the group and in individual patients. The group showed significant positive correlations between symptom intensity and blood flow in the right inferior frontal gyrus, caudate nucleus, putamen, globus pallidus and thalamus, and the left hippocampus and posterior cingulate gyrus. Negative correlations were evident in the right superior prefrontal cortex, and the temporoparietal junction, particularly on the right side. The pattern in single subjects was broadly similar, although individual differences in neural response were also observed. A graded relationship between symptom intensity and regional brain activity can thus be identified in obsessive–compulsive disorder. It is hypothesised that the increases in rCBF in the orbitofrontal cortex, neostriatum, global pallidus and thalamus were related to urges to perform compulsive movements, while those in the hippocampus and posterior cingulate cortex corresponded to the anxiety that accompanied them.

Among 29 multiply affected pedigrees, age of onset among parents and offspring was examined for evidence of both anticipation and genomic imprinting. The results do not suggest that either mechanism is operating in schizophrenia, but only very large effects can be confidently excluded.

This study represents the first attempt to study sexual jealousy in a random community sample. Jealousy was reported by all subjects. Men, when jealous, were particularly concerned about the potential loss of the partner, whereas women were more concerned with the effects of infidelity on the quality of the relationship. Behaviours such as searching the partner's belongings or inspecting their clothes for signs of sexual activity correlated with unusually intense jealousy. Men tended to cope with jealousy by using denial and avoidance, whereas women were more likely to express their distress and to try to make themselves more attractive to their erring partner. Greater jealousy concerns were expressed by young men who had either married early or were now living without a partner. Heavy drinkers and those reporting more psychiatric symptoms were also more prone to jealousy. A clear correlation emerged between lowered self-esteem and increased jealousy, which was particularly marked in women, for whom robust self-esteem was virtually incompatible with high jealousy concerns. The study supported the prosaic notion that those who are satisfied with their romantic attachments are less prone to jealous suspicions. This study offers a starting point for the clinician seeking information about the experience of jealousy in the community.

Recent studies have shown that cognitive therapy is an effective treatment for panic disorder. However, little is known about how cognitive therapy compares with other psychological and pharmacological treatments. To investigate this question 64 panic disorder patients were initially assigned to cognitive therapy, applied relaxation, imipramine (mean 233 mg/day), or a 3-month wait followed by allocation to treatment. During treatment patients had up to 12 sessions in the first 3 months and up to three booster sessions in the next 3 months. Imipramine was gradually withdrawn after 6 months. Each treatment included self-exposure homework assignments. Cognitive therapy and applied relaxation sessions lasted one hour. Imipramine sessions lasted 25 minutes. Assessments were before treatment/wait and at 3, 6, and 15 months. Comparisons with waiting-list showed all three treatments were effective. Comparisons between treatments showed that at 3 months cognitive therapy was superior to both applied relaxation and imipramine on most measures. At 6 months cognitive therapy did not differ from imipramine and both were superior to applied relaxation on several measures. Between 6 and 15 months a number of imipramine patients relapsed. At 15 months cognitive therapy was again superior to both applied relaxation and imipramine but on fewer measures than at 3 months. Cognitive measures taken at the end of treatment were significant predictors of outcome at follow-up.

We hypothesised that psychomotor disturbance is specific to the melancholic subtype of depression and capable of defining melancholia more precisely than symptom-based criteria sets. We studied 413 depressed patients, and examined the utility of a refined, operationally driven set of clinician-rated signs, principally against a set of historically accepted symptoms of endogeneity. We specified items defining psychomotor disturbance generally as well as those weighted either to agitation or to retardation. We demonstrated the system's capacity to differentiate ‘melancholic’ and ‘non-melancholic’ depression (and the comparable success of DSM–III–R and Newcastle criteria systems) by reference to several patient, illness and treatment response variables, to an independent measure of psychomotor disturbance (reaction time) and to a biological marker (the dexamethasone suppression test).

For the investigation of the early course of schizophrenia starting from onset, the standardised Interview for the Retrospective Assessment of the Onset of Schizophrenia was developed and validated. In a representative sample of 267 first-admitted German schizophrenics of a broad diagnosis from a population of 1.5 million, the age at which different diagnostic and onset definitions were satisfied, the symptoms at the time of the interview, and the accumulation of positive and negative symptoms until first admission were assessed. Comparison between the two sexes and three age groups yielded hardly any differences in the accumulation of symptoms and their course until first admission, except for a slightly shorter period of negative symptoms in young males and a slightly longer one in older women – which contradicts prevailing opinion. At the time of the interview, no significant sex differences were found with respect to the core symptoms of schizophrenia (negative and first-rank symptoms), but clear and substantial differences emerged in disease behaviour. The significantly higher age at first onset in women is explained, on the basis of animal experiments and a clinical study, by the neuromodulatory effect of oestrogen on D2 receptors and by a higher vulnerability threshold in women.

The issue of whether the incidence rate of schizophrenia may have declined over recent decades has generated considerable controversy. This study sought to ascertain and interview all patients who satisfied contemporary diagnostic criteria for schizophrenia within a defined and unusually homogeneous region of rural Ireland having a total population of 25 178 people; morbid risk for schizophrenia was then examined by quinquennia of birth from 1920–24 to 1965–69. Morbid risk appeared essentially constant for persons born between 1920 and 1939 but fell by 37% for those born between 1940 and 1969, the fall being considerably more prominent in females (–56%) than in males (–19%). Attention is focused on sexual dimorphism in cerebral development and on temporal changes in endogenous or exogenous factors that influence the rate of occurrence of schizophrenia in females.

The relationship between the quality of parents' attachment to their own parents and the quality of affective style was examined with a sample of 49 severely disturbed young adults and adolescents and their families receiving long-term in-patient treatment. Measures reflecting disturbances in attachment of parents to their own parents, derived from a five-minute speech sample task, were strongly associated with measures of negative affective style (e.g., criticism, intrusiveness and guilt induction) in face-to-face interactions with the disturbed offspring, as assessed through videotaped discussions of conflictual family issues after three months of treatment. The most significant findings involved the linkages between disturbances in the mother's attachment to her own mother and the degree of negative affect directed at the child patient. The association between disturbed intergenerational parental attachments and negative affective style supports the hypothesis that the parent's own internal burdens, stemming from disturbed attachment representations, particularly of the same-sex parent, may be a driving force behind the negative affect they display in interactions with their disturbed offspring.

During 1976, 80 patients with a primary depressive illness were selected from a consecutive series of referrals to the Royal Edinburgh Hospital for a short-term follow-up study. This paper concerns the 12-year longitudinal assessment of the survivors. During the follow-up, mortality risk for the sample was almost doubled. Of the series, 35% had experienced a recurrence within 2 years of the initial interview, and just over 60% within the entire study time of 12 years. The risk of recurrence was enhanced for those aged over 45 years at index, for those with a history of depressive disorder and for those who had not engaged in parasuicidal behaviour during the index episode. The observed effect of previous episodes was largely accounted for by age. The chance of recurrence was not affected by whether the treatment of the index episode included ECT, or by whether diagnosis was ‘endogenous’ or ‘neurotic’. Application of the Lee-Murray outcome criteria showed that about one-third of the Edinburgh series experienced a very poor outcome. Results are presented concerning the prediction of long-term outcome as represented by the Depression Outcome Scale (DOS), a measure specially constructed for this study.

Numerous studies have found that male schizophrenic patients have earlier ages at onset than females. However, none of these studies have corrected the observed ages for known gender differences in the age distribution of the population. Using a pre-existing data set, we applied a non-parametric method to correct the male and female distributions of observed age at onset for sex-specific age distributions. The distributions of observed age at onset indicated earlier onset among males. After correction, the age-at-onset distributions shifted toward older ages, but the difference between males and females remained statistically significant. Thus, gender differences in the age at onset of schizophrenia are not artefactual.

It has long been thought that rates of mental illness are higher in cities than elsewhere, because of crowding and resultant stress. In the case of schizophrenia, there are some marked exceptions to generally higher prevalence rates in industrialised cities. Factors such as migration, culture, infectious disease, demographic rates, and other social processes may affect geographical differences in rates. The excess of schizophrenia in central city areas has been given two opposing explanations – the ‘breeder’ hypothesis and ‘social drift’. Data on incidence from three cities are compared, but do not reveal a clear common picture. Environmental factors connected with urban living are of two main types – social and non-social – which are not mutually exclusive; ‘urban’ may also have a variety of meanings. Rather than ‘urbanicity’ being an independent aetiological factor in schizophrenia, its effect may be largely explained in terms of migration and social class.

The paper describes a case-note and interview study of a cross-sectional sample comprising 25% of all women serving a prison sentence in England and Wales. A 5% sample of the male sentenced prison population was used for comparison. Diagnoses were assigned on clinical grounds and an assessment was made of the treatment needs of all ‘cases’. The prevalence of psychosis, around 2%, was similar in the two groups but women had higher rates of mental handicap (6% v. 2%), personality disorder (18% v. 10%), neurosis (18% v. 10%) and substance abuse (26% v. 12%). There is a need for closer links between the NHS and prison health services. Women's prisons lack a therapeutic community of the Grendon type, which may be of benefit to a substantial minority of inmates.

The phenomenological features of 35 obsessive–compulsive disorder (OCD) patients with a lifetime history of tics were compared to 35 age- and sex-matched OCD patients without tics. Seven categories of obsessions and nine categories of compulsions were determined using the symptom checklist of the Yale–Brown Obsessive–Compulsive Scale (YBOCS). Discriminant function analysis revealed that, compared to their counterparts without tics, OCD patients with tics had more touching, tapping, rubbing, blinking and staring rituals, and fewer cleaning rituals, but did not differ on obsessions. These preliminary findings suggest that the types of compulsions present may help to discriminate between two putative subgroups of OCD, i.e. those with and without tics.

In a sample of 120 long-stay in-patients who fulfilled DSM–III–R criteria for schizophrenia, chronic akathisia and pseudoakathisia were relatively common, with prevalence figures of 24% and 18%, respectively. Compared with patients without evidence of chronic akathisia, those patients with the condition were significantly younger, were receiving significantly higher doses of antipsychotic medication, and were more likely to be receiving a depot antipsychotic. Patients who experienced the characteristic inner restlessness and compulsion to move of akathisia also reported marked symptoms of dysphoria, namely tension, panic, irritability and impatience. The findings support the suggestion that dysphoric mood is an important feature of akathisia. Male patients appeared to be at an increased risk of pseudoakathisia. No significant relation was found between chronic akathisia and tardive dyskinesia, although there was a trend for trunk and limb dyskinesia to be commonest in patients with chronic akathisia while orofacial dyskinesia was most frequently observed in those with pseudoakathisia. Akathisia may mask the movements of tardive dyskinesia in the lower limb. There was no evidence that akathisia was associated with positive or negative symptoms of schizophrenia nor with depression.

All referrals to medical officers in Brixton Prison over a five-month period in 1989 were examined. This paper reports the progress through this remand prison of those men who were considered to be suffering from a major psychiatric disorder. Many men had been charged with relatively minor offences. The net effect of medical intervention was to delay release from custody. Because of the administrative delays inherent in the system of medical referral and hospital admission under section 37 of the Mental Health Act 1983, it was those prisoners who were most ill who tended to remain in prison for the longest periods. Judged in terms of its efficiency to ensure speedy treatment for mentally ill remanded offenders, the present system is regarded as cumbersome and extremely inefficient. It is suggested that greater use should be made of section 48 of the 1983 Act to divert mentally ill, remanded offenders from prison.

In the context of a prevalence survey of schizophrenia in South Westminster, a questionnaire was administered to 271 patients to assess alcohol-related morbidity. In this epidemiologically based sample, the lifetime prevalence of alcohol abuse was 22.1 %. Compared with control patients matched for age and sex, these index cases had a significantly shorter duration of illness. A possible explanation is that drinking may mask the onset of schizophrenia, leading to a delay in diagnosis. The index cases also had significantly higher ratings for hallucinations and for hostility, anxiety and depression, and a greater number of disturbed types of behaviour. The highest levels of alcohol consumption were associated with more severe orofacial dyskinesia, suggesting that alcohol use may be an added risk factor for the development of tardive dyskinesia in some patients. The severity of akathisia was also related to alcohol use, and there were significant relationships between the subjective distress related to akathisia and the level of abuse. A possible interpretation is that alcohol had been used by patients with akathisia to alleviate the associated agitation and dysphoria.

In the first study to systematically examine postnatal depression in fathers, we examined depression in 200 postnatal couples, using a two-stage design. The prevalence of depression ascertained by the 13-item Edinburgh Postnatal Depression Scale (EPDS), using a cut-off score for ‘caseness’ of 13 or more in an unselected postnatal sample, was 27.5% in mothers at six weeks postpartum, 25.7% in mothers at six months postpartum, 9.0% in fathers at six weeks postpartum, and 5.4% in fathers at six months postpartum. The prevalence did not differ significantly in either mothers or fathers from a control group of parents with children between three and five years of age. As expected, mothers had a significantly higher prevalence of psychiatric ‘caseness’ at both six weeks and six months postpartum than fathers. Fathers were significantly more likely to be cases if their partners were also cases. The hypothesis that different aetiological factors would be important in brief and persistent disorders in mothers was upheld.

The integrative concept of ‘affect logic’ is based on a hypothesis concerning the laws of interaction between emotion and cognition. ”Affects“ are defined as global psychophysiological states which determine the prevailing functional ‘logic’, i.e. the specific ways in which cognitive elements are selected and linked together. This leads to an integrative psychosocio-biological evolutionary model of schizophrenia, in which a specific affective–cognitive vulnerability is built up in a first phase, through escalating interactions between unfavourable genetic–biological and psychosocial influences. In a second phase, the mental system is decompensated by psychosocial or biological stressors which induce psychosis. The great variability in long-term course (third phase) is conditioned by the complex interplay of many biological and psychosocial variables. The organising functions of affects are evident in schizophrenic core phenomena such as ambivalence, incoherence, and emotional flattening. This proposed model has numerous practical and theoretical implications.