Psychiatric illness in gynaecological outpatients: a preliminary study.

Psychiatric patients frequently make somatic complaints which are not related to physical pathology, but this is often not fully appreciated by medical practitioners other than psychia trists. Dowling and Knox (1964) have shown that depressive patients are often diagnosed as physically ill, especially if they have had a notable physical illness in the previous five years. Stoeckle and Davidson (1962) note that depressive patients are frequently referred to medical and surgicalclinicsand sometimes receive inappropriate treatment as a result. Sainsbury (1960) showed that gynaecological patients are, on average, more neurotic than normal. The present author (Munro, 1964) found that depressive women were excessively liable to have undergone a gynaecological operation in the year preceding their admission to psychiatric hospital. Arising from this last observation, it was decided to carry out an investigation of psychia tric symptomatology in gynaecological out patients. The main aim was to identify emo tionally disturbed women and to see whether they were particularly liable to undergo operation. A pilot study was carried out in the Professorial Gynaecological Clinic of the Royal Infirmary of Edinburgh, but the definitive study was not started, as the investigator was appointed to a post elsewhere. As the preliminary results show some interesting trends, they are presented in this article.