Search

The terms “normal” and “normality” are sometimes used with a sense of authority that defies the questioning of their validity. This paper reviews different parameters of “normality” and points out difficulties in its conceptualisation. The implications of the designation of deviation from normality are then discussed. In concluding, the acceptance of a wide range of “normality” is stressed.

The vast array of community mental health programs, which in the aggregate constitute a treatment resource of huge proportions, virtually ignores planning or actually providing services to mentally retarded persons. The underutilization of this resource is a problem deserving greater attention. This paper discusses some of the major problems impeding provision of services to the retarded through community mental health programs. Discussed are such items as the nature of retardation, patterns of American culture, attitudes of professional persons, some influences by volunteer agencies, and a method of system design.

THIS PAPER reports the results of a sociocultural and clinical investigation that was conducted on a sample of working class Mexican psychiatric outpatients. There is such social scientific and psychiatric interest in the mental health of the different social status groupings, but most of the work reported deals with American findings. 1-5 One of the aims of this study was to obtain in some detail demographic, cultural, and clinical characteristics of a sample of working class patients living in a different cultural setting. Although there are few formal psychiatric studies dealing with Mexico, there does exist considerable behavioral science data that touch on population and sociocultural characteristics of Mexicans. 6-15 Attempts at comparing in depth and with considerable rigor personality development in different nations (including Mexico and the United States) are currently underway. 16-19 There does exist, then, a body of background information that

A. Introduction IN COMPANION papers on the Family Studies research at the National Institute of Mental Health, we have indicated that our research has been focused upon links between individual schizophrenic impairment and family patterns of thinking and communicating. 1-5 In the study of individual offspring we have been especially concerned with the structural or formal aspects of ego disorganization, particularly thought disorder. We have conceptualized schizophrenic thinking along a continuum based upon broad developmental principles in which relatively "amorphous" forms of thinking can be distinguished from better differentiated but still "fragmented" forms of thinking. 3 In the present study we have also used a dimension of severity of ego disorganization as well as traditional diagnostic distinctions. In the study of family patterns we have been especially concerned with those family styles of communicating and relating which help shape a growing child's forms of thinking.

This paper explores some of the influences of social structure upon the aged. The implications of individual changes in roles and patterns of group living are examined in relationship to the institutional organization and value system of American society.

SCHIZOPHRENIA, most dreaded of all mental illness, has plagued mankind for countless years without abatement. Although it reached significance as a discrete clinical entity under the rubric of dementa precox only in 1860, approximately 7,000 papers on the subject by Bellak's1count have been published between 1936 and 1956. It is likely that in the last 100 years more investigators have spent more time, money, and energy, and written more on schizophrenia than on all other psychiatric problems combined. Yet our ignorance concerning its definition, causes, course, treatments, and outcome is still abysmal. The most we can say is that several theories have been developed which are competitive, each one promising resolution of all the problems of etiology. We gain little satisfaction from the fact that psychiatry in its investigations of schizophrenia is no more backward than oncology in its researches