Aim. To assess the effects of acquired social status, neurotic conditions, type D personality, cognitive functions, quality life and adherence to treatment on psychosocial adaptation patients with coronary heart disease (IHD) chronic failure (CHF), depending severity decompensation.
 Methods. 87 artery aged between 55 72 years were examined. All divided into two groups functional class [Ne...

Somatic distress syndromes, which include somatoform disorders and syndromes of chronic fatigue such as neurasthenia but not somatic presentations of anxiety and depression, are one of the common expressions of distress in primary care (Ormel et al. 1994) and general hospital settings (Hemert et al. 1993). They are of considerable importance cross-culturally (Ono et al. 1999), and often lie at ...

ROBERT BOYLE (1627-1691) is known to every schoolboy for his discovery of the law of gaseous elasticity, "Boyle's law". He was one of the foremost "experimental natural philosophers" of his time, an original fellow of the Royal Society of London and author of many works dealing with physics, chemistry, physiology, theology, etc. Not so well known perhaps is that he was created Doctor of Medicin...

In 1967, Bronisław Malinowski’s daughter published part of the journal that he kept from 1908 to 1918, as A Diary in Strict Sense Term. Malinowski had never intended these personal reflections, recorded during his expeditions Mailu and Trobriand Islands between 1914 1918. They became subject discussions polemics. The “triviality” issues addressed astonished many readers led some critics, such a...

There is substantial evidence that obsessivecompulsive disorder (OCD) symptoms can be grouped into a series of discrete dimensions, and some evidence that not all OCD symptom dimensions respond equally well to treatment interventions. The response of OCD symptom dimensions to 12 weeks of treatment with escitalopram/placebo, was investigated by Dan J. Stein, MD, PhD, and colleagues. Factor analy...

During an epidemiological survey conducted in Tokyo in 1988 by the Department of Psychiatry, Tokyo Metropolitan Institute of Gerontology, I met two demented elderly women in the course of interviewing city residents. The first woman, G., was 74 years old. When I visited her, she was almost bedridden as a result of right hemiplegia and she was lying on an unclean mattress on a floor of straw mat...

In a paper in this issue, Rief et al. [1] present a new scale for assessing illness behaviour. The Scale of the Assessment of Illness Behaviour (SAIB) comprises five dimensions: verification of diagnosis, expression of symptoms, medication reliance, illness consequences and bodily scanning. The initial validation of the scale has been completed through comparison of patients presenting with une...

IN the prefatory letter to his great book In Darkest Africa, Henry Morton Stanley wrote' . . . it is with unqualified delight that I acknowledge the priceless services of my friends Stairs, Jephson, Nelson and Parke, four men whose devotion to their several duties were as perfect as human nature is capable of.' These four men alone of his eleven European officers on the Emin Pasha Relief Expedi...

The conventional view would appear to define hysterical symptoms (whether so-called conversion symptoms or hysterical dissociation) in terms of a number of features. The first is the occurrence of a symptom which, if taken at face value, would be an indication of some underlying pathological process; yet no pathology of a conventional kind can be elicited, and the presence of such pathology (wh...

Respected Chairperson, distinguished guests, members of the Indian Psychiatric Society, ladies and gentlemen. It is a matter of great privilege and honour for me to deliver the Tilak Venkoba Rao Oration on the occasion of ANCIPS2000. lam highly grateful to the Indian Psychiatric Society for bestowing me with this honour. As you know, this oration was instituted by Prof. A. Venkoba Rao and Prof....