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The World Federation for Mental Health (WFMH) is an international, multi-professional non-governmental organization (NGO), including citizen volunteers and former patients. It was founded in 1948 in the same era as the United Nations (UN) and the World Health Organization (WHO). For many years, led mainly by psychiatrists focused on social, peace-related and human rights issues, it was the only international mental health NGO consulting with UN agencies. Since the late 1990s, as a global alliance of national mental health associations focused mainly on traditional mental health issues and on prevention and promotion, it has continued its long-time collaboration with WHO. Its policy concerns and those of international professional associations such as the WPA could be mutually advanced through partnerships aimed at achieving common goals.

Force and electromyographic (EMG) activity of the biceps and triceps brachii were measured in 15 strength-trained men during maximal isometric action of the forearm flexors, with the elbow at 90 degrees, following 20-s periods of psyching (PSY), reading aloud (RA), and mental arithmetic (MA). Perceived arousal and attentional focus ratings for PSY were greater than those obtained for RA and MA, which were undifferentiated. Perceived effort, biceps and triceps EMG, and maximal force did not differ across conditions. Therefore, in highly trained men under conditions of brief exertion, when the biomechanics of the muscular action were controlled, psyching resulted in a perception of enhanced readiness but did not influence force or muscular activation differently from psychological states that were preceded by distraction.

Twelve aerobically trained males (age 22 +/- 1.3 yr, range 18-31) were studied to determine the effects of VE and EMG feedback upon cardiorespiratory and muscular activity during one segment of a continuous 36-min bout of treadmill running just below ventilatory threshold (VT). Ventilatory, metabolic, cardiovascular, RPE, and EMG variables recorded during a 12-min feedback segment were compared with those observed during 12-min attentional distraction and control conditions. The three treatments were counterbalanced. Mean VO2 (2987 ml.min-1) remained constant across the three periods as did VCO2 (3102 ml.min-1), HR (168 bpm), RQ (0.95), and O2 pulse (18.5 ml.beat-1). However, VE was significantly reduced during feedback (Fb) as compared with both the distraction (D) and control (C) conditions (mean +/- SE: 83.2 +/- 3.6 vs 86.6 +/- 4.2 and 87.8 +/- 4.2 l.min-1, respectively). This effect was marked by a reduction in respiratory rate (RR) (41.1 +/- 2.1 vs 44.5 +/- 1.9 and 46.8 +/- 1.9 breaths.min-1 for Fb, D, and C, respectively) and an increase in tidal volume (TV) (2115 +/- 144 vs 1904 +/- 110 and 2020 +/- 102 ml.breath-1 for Fb, D, and C, respectively). These changes resulted in significant reductions in VE/VO2 (26.5 +/- 0.7 vs 28.9 +/- 1.0 and 28.3 +/- 0.9 ratio magnitudes), VE/VO2 (28.1 +/- 0.8 vs 30.2 +/- 1.0 and 29.7 +/- 1.0 ratio magnitudes), and PETO2 (105.5 +/- 1.0 vs 108.4 +/- 1.1 and 107.6 +/- 1.2 mm Hg) during Fb as compared with D and C, respectively.(ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 250 WORDS)

Ethnography is process yielding a particular kind of knowledge, From the psychoanalytic perspective this bears on the question: how many individual lives which report their own experience, but cannot directly apprehend the unconscious factors behind that experience, be related to social life which does not report itself but is observed and interpreted by others? The person of the ethnographer and ethnographer-informant relationships are considered in this respect. Clinicians' informants include people to whom they relate in the course of adaptation to the new community; those who are help-seeking (patients) with whom their relationship is both therapeutic and investigative; and clients in health-service (e.g., family planning)contexts who may be studied with tests and structured interviews. The clinician's status, role, helping and scientific values are examined as factors determining the nature of knowledge gained under these various circumstances. To the degree that the clinician is an intentional transformer, data emerge as the informant's consciousness changes in the therapeutic or research process. Research or therapy-aimed interventions based on psychoanalytic theory add their own epistemological problems to the process.

Information about health and disease has high social value and is, thus, subject to a variety of controls. These influence the freedom of investigators to generate it; of editors and publishers to transmit it; and of professionals and the public to have access to it. Unconstrained research may threaten the social order and evoke legal or political limit setting. Prominent in the present era are the possibilities of dangerous ethical and biological consequences of new knowledge or, perhaps more important, of procedures for obtaining it. Medical information is transmitted through both the mass media and professional journals. Access to both by potential authors is limited by institutionalized mechanisms of social control and the academic-research subculture. An emerging factor is the editor's possible ethical responsibility for material which he accepts for publication. Access to information is determined by what finally is published, as well as membership in informal communication networks. It is also influenced by dependence, due to cost, time limitation and information overload, on prepackaged material presented in texts, anthologies, busy clinician-oriented journals, or commercial, e.g., pharmaceutical firms. The possibility that governments will, in time, become the major distributors as well as generators of medical information raises new questions as to its eventual freedom and control.

Sapir defined the human unconscious as a mechanism (based on phonemes learned during language acquisition) which imposes linguistic forms upon out-of-awareness 'psychic content' or 'elements of experience', rather than as a repository of repressed impulses or ideas striving for expression. In contemporary terms this activity may be regarded as unconscious information processing prequisite to experiential residues becoming available to conscious attention. It also imposes (as in 'projecting') the observer's cultural forms, modified by developmental experience, upon communications from others. This view antedates Lévi-Strauss' unconscious which 'transforms' elements of the past 'into language' and Lacan's unconscious structured 'like a language'. The clinical psychoanalytic study of out-of-awareness mental processes, understood as a dialectic shaped by the discrepancy in power between analyst and patient, illuminates the unstable relationship between the words or signifiers selected by the patient from the infinite lexicon of available, usually socially shared, verbal or non-verbal language (his plane of expression) and his varied preconscious collections of signifieds, including cultural as well as personal developmental knowledge (his plane of content).

Schizophrenia is regarded as a final common behavioral syndrome which may be arrived at though a variety of routes. Even with a probably genotype, environmental influence seems necessary for the phenotype to appear. The problem concerns the likelihood of an early experience-induced sequence of events within the person of infant and later adult vs. a continuing pathogenic environment. Either may or may not interact with a continuing genic factor(s) as a source of vulnerability. Vulnerability is here, then, viewed as epigenetically evolving via individual-environment transactions throughout life (although with major impacts from conception through adolescence). At any point, therapeutic intervention may preclude or minimize the actualization of the pathogenic potential. It may begin during pregnancy, with attention to such factors as diet, drugs, physical stress, and illness, influencing fetal development and obstetrical manipulations and the birth process. All influence earliest mother-infant interaction from the point of view both of the infant's evocation of maternal behavior and maternal responsivity. Therapeutic interventions also include attention to the multigenerational context of earliest interaction, with special reference to a woman's relationships with her own mother. At every point, nonspecific protective or pathogenic factors such as social support or stressful precipitating events may become important. Socioeconomic status appears to have a powerful nonspecific influence as the core of a cluster of factors which exert an enduring influence from infancy to adulthood. A continuing specific factor may reside in distorted communicative reciprocity between parent an child rooted in the preverbal period of infant development. Context-mediated cerebral deficits may influence learning capacity, hedonic capacity, behavioral rigidity, and many other factors leading ultimately to impaired social competence and increased vulnerability.