Some factors relating to mental illness in a new town

Environmental Stressors and Mental Health in Remote Resource Boom Communities

This article explores the impact of environmental stressors on the psychological health of residents of remote resource boom communities, using Goldberg's General Health Questionnaire (GHQ) as a measure of impairment. Analysis of survey data collected for over 1000 men and women in 13 such towns around Australia suggests that residents' perception of their environ ment as stressful in fact had little significant influence on whether or not they were classified in terms of GHQ criteria as probable psychiatric cases. Results showed, moreover, that despite differences between towns in terms of isolation, size, remoteness and harshness of the environment, there was no sig nificant difference in the GHQ scores of men or women across towns varying according to these criteria. Most of the small amount of variance in scores that could be explained was accounted for by loneliness, which had both a direct and a con ditioning effect. Research elsewhere, however, suggests that this may be an individual trait, rather than a function of the social environment of the resource boom towns themselves.

Depression and the physical environment. A study of young married women on a London housing estate

A depression-screening instrument (DSI) was administered to all 25-34-year-old, British-born, married women registered with a health centre on a south-east London housing estate. A disproportionate number of high scorers lived in those dwellings with the highest disadvantagement score. The dwelling interiors of the high DSI scorers were significantly poorer in appearance compared with those of the low scorers. Significantly more of the high scorers (and of their husbands) described the estate as unpleasant, and bad for their children. They raised significantly more objections to other residents' (including children's) behaviour. Their complaints were only partly explicable in terms of their less favourable accommodation.

Medical Research Council Clinical Psychiatry Unit

The Clinical Research Department was started at Graylingwell Hospital, Chichester, Sussex, by Dr. J. Carse in 1947, when the hospital was administered by Sussex County Council. The first director was Dr. (now Professor) E. Stengel, and he undertook the first systematic follow-up of leucotomized patients. From 1950 to 1955 the director was Dr. Martin Roth; his studies on the psychoses of old age, and especially those delineating depressive psychoses, are now a landmark in clinical research. At about this time, the means by which clinical research in the National Health Service hospitals should be administered was reviewed and a policy evolved whereby departments in which clinical research was prospering and whose further development would make financial demands beyond those available to the regional hospital boards would be considered for support by the Medical Research Council.