The aim of this social-psychiatric and personal follow-up examination has been to illustrate the long-term prognosis of Norwegian youth suffering from psychiatric disorders which initially presented during peacetime compulsory military service. The follow-up examinations were conducted personally, and a control group of presumed healthy men was also followed. Sund (1968, 1970) has made a systematic comparison between the patient group and the control group concerning prognosis. Here, therefore, the main emphasis will be on a comparison of the courses followed by clinically different diagnostic sub-group. Eitinger (1950) showed the necessity of undertaking personal follow-up examinations in order to map out the prognosis for this kind of patient. Prognostic studies outside Scandinavia have been reported by Ginzberg et al. (1959), by Glass et al. (1956) and by Plag and Arthur (1965). However, the periods of observation in these studies have been short; moreover, adjustment to the military system was the objective, and the cases were not personally examined in a follow-up. It has been difficult to find prognostic studies with sufficiently long observation periods and with personal follow-up to serve as an adequate basis of comparison with our material. To a large extent, therefore, we have chosen to see the development of our patients in relation to our knowledge of psychiatric reactions in the rest of the population.

In 1955 an epidemic occurred among the staff of a London Teaching Hospital group. The nature of the epidemic remains uncertain. One view is that the illness was a viral encephalomyelitis (Medical Staff Report, 1957); an alternative is that it was a manifestation of anxiety spreading through a population consisting largely of young women (McEvedy and Beard, 1970). This paper reports the results from the follow-up study carried out in 1968–69 on the nuclear group affected by the epidemic and on a matched series of controls.

Previous studies (McConaghy, 1969, 1970a; McConaghy et al., 1972) evaluated the efficacy of three widely different forms of aversion therapy in treating homosexuality. The methods investigated were aversion-relief, apomorphine therapy, and avoidance conditioning.

Psychotherapists tend to view homosexuality as a neurosis or as a neurotic symptom (Sadger, 1909, 1921; Klein, 1932; Rado, 1940; Ellis, 1952, 1955; Bieber et al., 1962; Ovesey et al., 1963). In support of this viewpoint, several authors have observed that the frequency of typical neurotic phenomena in homosexual males is much higher than that in a heterosexual male population, and have concluded that homosexuality is one of the neurotic symptoms of their patients (Stekel, 1929; Henry, 1937; Ellis, 1959; Musaph, 1960; Doidge and Holtzman, 1960). However, an alternative interpretation is that such maladaptive patterns develop from the difficult situation of a homosexual male in a heterosexual society and from the general disapproval he encounters. Moreover, the finding of increased prevalence of neurotic symptoms in homosexual males has itself been challenged by Kronfeld (1923) and Hooker (1957), who pointed out that the investigated homosexual males represented a selection of people who sought psychiatric help. Hooker studied non-patient samples from homosexuals' clubs and did not find an abnormally high frequency of neurotic symptoms.

Respiratory relief (R.R.) appeared to be a simple and rapid treatment for specific phobias and for the phobic components of more complex neurotic conditions (Orwin, 1971). The basic hypothesis was that the R.R., satisfying an intense need to breathe, if simultaneous with the presentation of a phobic stimulus, would inhibit the degree of anxiety previously provoked and that this inhibition would persist. The need to breathe was induced by voluntary restriction up to maximum voluntary respiratory arrest (M.V.R.A.). As in conventional desensitization (Wolpe, 1958), a hierarchy was drawn up and the patients were desensitized using R.R. instead of relaxation. Carbon dioxide-oxygen mixtures were introduced because CO2 is known to stimulate respiration, and it was expected that by intensifying the need to breathe the speed and effectiveness of treatment would be increased by the augmented respiratory relief (A.R.R.).

Agoraphobia was the name given by Westphal (1871) to the fear of walking through streets and public places. The agoraphobic syndrome, which covers much else and includes fear of confined spaces, crowds, travelling and shopping, was carefully defined by Marks (1969). His full description and review revealed, perhaps surprisingly, that although the desire to escape rapidly from a feared situation has been clearly recognized in the literature, no detailed observation seems to have been made of the rate of locomotion in this condition.

The term psychogenic headache is not regarded as defining a meaningful diagnostic entity and can be used to refer to any type of headache in which psychological factors appear to play a significant aetiological role.

The value of chlorpromazine in combating psychosis and its various symptoms has been firmly established in the last twenty years. The occurrence of sudden death and severe hypotensive reaction after being given the drug has been documented in the world literature (Kelly et al., 1963; Graupner et al., 1964; Rosati, 1964; Hollister et al., 1965; Grollman, 1965; Leestma et al., 1968).

This paper is an extension of an earlier introductory one (1) and evaluates the results of treatment with parenteral and oral chlorimipramine of 200 patients suffering from depressive states of varying severity. The current research project was started in January 1968, and is still in progress. Further references to the literature may be obtained from the original paper or by application to the author. Fifty-seven of the cases treated were so severely depressed that ECT would normally have been given. All were in-patients and were treated with intravenous infusions of chlorimipramine. The other 143 patients were less severely depressed and were seen as out-patients. They were treated with increasing doses of oral chlorimipramine, but a few cases in both groups also had ECT to expedite recovery. Approximately 50 patients exhibited obsessional features in addition to depression, and their response to treatment was so promising as to merit special mention.

Ergotamine preparations are extensively used in the treatment of migraine. Although not widely appreciated, there have been reports in the literature of ergotamine abuse, related to the development of tolerance and withdrawal headaches, which result in a steadily increasing consumption of the drug (Wolfson and Graham, 1949; Peters and Horton, 1951; Friedman et al., 1955). It is important clinically to recognize this condition, as ergotamine can have dangerous vascular side-effects (Byrne-Quinn, 1964; Cranley et al., 1963; Young and Humphries, 1961).