The New Year is the best time to introduce a new-look journal to our readers. We hope the changes we present are not seen merely as those of a follower of fashion and a need to change just because all around us are changing, but rather as an evolving process in making The British Journal of Psychiatry more interesting, more readable, more informative and, in a word, better. However, we have to justify such high-flown rhetoric with something approaching evidence and hope your feedback will help. Some of the changes may surprise you but they are the product of extensive deliberation and thought, and not taken lightly. They include a new cover, a change to two-colour text, a different typeface and column layout, adoption of the Vancouver reference style, more pictures and photographs and, in the words of our new Executive Contents Editor Robert Howard, more treats. Treats in this context I judge to be sections of the Journal that everyone wants to read – even though these might not have the sonorous impact of the original papers they are a little easier on the cortex than some of our other offerings.

A little history

In putting our work into context I would like to go back to the first learned journal in the English language, the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, and the message heading its first volume in 1665; ‘giving some accompt [sic] of the present undertakings, studies and labours of the ingenious in many considerable parts of the world’. ^{Reference Oldenburg1} Well, indeed. We could do much worse in The British Journal of Psychiatry in sticking to this message when we judge what to publish. It is worth reminding ourselves that the learned journal revolution initiated by the Philosophical Transactions is currently, after 343 years of expansion, in some danger of decline with the onset of ‘open access’, a process which paradoxically may lead to articles being read less rather than more. Some often forget that what you read in The British Journal of Psychiatry and other journals is a delicately fashioned product that owes much to the diligence of unsung scribes and editors. As Sampson has commented, ‘Academics are experts on their subjects, but most are no better at writing clearly and unambiguously, or even avoiding spelling mistakes, than others tend to be these days. Before an academic manuscript gets into print it has to be polished, often heavily polished, to make it readable; but the research councils propose that authors will upload their own stuff into electronic “depositories”, so the polishing will stop’. ^{Reference Sampson2}

Why we write and read

My hope is that you will still read papers with pleasure on the printed page at least as much as you browse on the internet – the second verb being chosen presumably because it describes consuming information that takes days to digest – and our new look is designed to promote this. The wider range of contents should also help our contributors. Ever since I first read George Orwell's Why I Write ^{Reference Orwell3} I have been aware how apposite it is to all of us who want more than family members and carefully chosen friends to read what we put down on paper. I certainly detect Orwell's four criteria for writing in my own work and hope I am not unsettling any of our recent authors by giving further examples of Orwellian wisdom found in their contributions, and in turn illustrating how our new-look Journal satisfies the criteria also. First:

Of course, here Orwell is absolutely right. In a recent talk at the American Psychiatric Association, a speaker identified at least 80% of clinical psychiatric academics in the USA as satisfying the criteria for narcissistic personality disorder, so we can only thank our lucky stars that we across the pond entrust our diagnostic practice to the ICD, which, I suspect precisely for this reason, does not identify this highly prevalent condition as a formal diagnosis. Although we editors try desperately to strip the egoism from our authors, it cannot help creeping in and it is clearly a prominent factor in our editorials and correspondence. It even enters, more subtly, our original papers. So, for example, in a study entitled ‘Critical developments in the assessment of personality disorder’ published in one of our supplements, we find that the senior author has cited his own work in 28 (27%) of the 104 references. ^{Reference Tyrer, Coombs, Ibrahimi, Mathilakath, Bajaj, Ranger, Rao and Din4} What hubris, what arrogance and how much more partial can you get in an allegedly objective review? The title should have been ‘Critical developments in the assessment of personality disorder: a biased and prejudiced review’ and was clearly no more than an ego trip. Second:

Can we find aesthetic enthusiasm in our Journal? Of course we can. Take, for instance, Bloch & Green ^{Reference Bloch and Green5} (quoting William Carlos Williams) ^{Reference Williams and Coles6} :

What could be better than this introduction by Bloch & Green ^{Reference Bloch and Green5} to illustrate the dilemmas posed by ethics in medicine and psychiatry? We accept that some of our other work, particularly the stringent requirements of systematic reviews, makes the entry of aesthetics more difficult. However, if we take, for example, the summary of the five types of Chinese schizophrenia – phlegm-fire; phlegm-damp; qi stagnation with blood stasis; hyperactivity of fire due to yin deficiency; and other miscellaneous types ^{Reference Rathbone, Zhang, Zhang, Xia, Liu, Yang and Adams7} – we are far removed from every railway timetable, apart from the confusing one to Woking. ^{Reference Tyrer8}

The third Orwellian reason for writing is more familiar to those who frequent learned journals:

I would prefer ‘The search for truth’ rather than Orwell's title here, as one of the burning desires fuelling authors on their path to publication is to produce new evidence that contradicts the old. This is much more painful when researchers fail to replicate the findings of others and debate about the causes of the differences illustrates the Popperian view that truth is never absolute. Much of what we publish in The British Journal of Psychiatry comes under this category and also includes many negative findings when they seem to be well-founded. Thus, the failure of cognitive–behavioural therapy to prevent relapse in bipolar disorder any more than did treatment as usual when ‘more than half of the patients had a recurrence by 18 months, with no significant differences between groups’ ^{Reference Scott, Paykel, Morriss, Bentall, Kinderman, Johnson, Abbott and Hayhurst9} is clearly upsetting for those who have produced opposite evidence (and may even arouse a little egoism), and we can only wait for more data before we can formulate clear conclusions.

Last, and certainly most important in Orwell's writing career:

Clearly, if we take Orwell's definition, we give voice to this desire, most recently in our efforts to improve publication rates from the current 3.7% in the less affluent countries that account for over 80% of the global population. ^{Reference Patel and Kim10}

What Orwell did not mention is the combination of entertainment and instruction that is behind much writing and which, I have to confess, is one of my main motivators. This is where the treats come in but, as surprise is yet another reason why people are attracted to reading, I want to keep their full nature in reserve. In any case, only Robert Howard knows exactly what they are.