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Context: Psychiatry is given very less importance in the Indian undergraduate medical curriculum and this affects the attitudes of students toward psychiatry and mentally ill patients. Aim: To study the attitude of undergraduate medical students and interns toward psychiatry and mentally ill patients. Materials and Methods: Undergraduate medical students and interns of a private medical college and research institute in South India consented to form our sample. We studied the General Health Questionnaire, overall level of satisfaction in ongoing Medical course using Visual Analog Scale, attitudes toward psychiatry scale and the attitudes toward mentally ill patient′s scale of the students, with their informed consent. SPSS version 18 was used for analysis of data. Results: Participation rate was 96%. Mean age of entire sample was 20.56 years. The total mean score on the General Health Questionnaire was 13.52 in first year but became worse toward internship (18.2). The level of satisfaction in the medical course dipped from 86% at baseline to 20% during internship. Equally high scores were noted in the attitude toward mentally ill scale. On the attitude toward psychiatry scale, there were more views on psychiatry as being an unscientific specialty, psychiatrists being considered poor role models, and psychiatric teaching was of low quality and psychiatry was the least preferred career choice. Conclusions: The undergraduate medical students have a very unfavorable attitude toward psychiatry and mentally ill patients.

Coprophagia or the ingestion of feces, considered to be a variant of pica, has been associated with medical disorders like seizure disorders, cerebral atrophy, and tumors and with psychiatric disorders like mental retardation, alcoholism, depression, obsessive compulsive disorder, schizophrenia, schizoaffective disorder, fetishes, delirium, and dementia. But entomophagy or the practice of eating live or dead insects as food by humans has only been reported as part of eating habits by some cultures in the world and not in association with any medical or neuropsychiatric disorders. Till date, there is no report in medical literature of entomophagy as an association with any neuropsychiatric or medical illnesses. Coprophagy and entomophagy has not been together reported as well. We describe the first ever case report of a 19-year- old male patient diagnosed with undifferentiated schizophrenia and associated with both entomophagy and coprophagy. His schizophrenic symptoms, the entomophagic, coprophagic behaviors improved with olanzapine therapy. Entomophagy and coprophagy, two very unusual human behaviors, can be seen in association with schizophrenia.

The article presents a case study of a 45-year-old male with Klingsor syndrome, a rare condition characterized by self-mutilation triggered by commanding hallucinations. Topics discussed include the patient's history of depression and alcohol abuse, the psychiatric and surgical interventions employed, and the call for more research on Klingsor syndrome and its associated risk factors.

Byline: Anand. Lingeswaran, Deepak. Barathi, Gyaneswahr. Sharma The Dandy-Walker malformation is a congenital brain malformation, typically involving the fourth ventricle and the cerebellum. To date, the Dandy-Walker syndrome has not [...]