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After World War II, several psychiatrists in the USA began treating schizophrenic patients psychoanalytically. Various methods were applied. However, all approaches were based on the assumption that people with schizophrenia had suffered severe trauma in their early childhood. The therapy was intended to give the patients some of the love and care they had previously missed, and heal them in this way. In the early 1950s, the Psychiatric University Hospital of Zurich was likely the first state hospital in Europe to apply and study analytical psychotherapy for psychoses. Although clinical psychiatry was usually suspicious of, if not radically opposed to, the psychotherapy of schizophrenia, these trials attracted wide international interest. By pursuing a cultural-historical praxeological approach, the contribution examines the psychotherapeutic attempt and its consequences in Zurich and beyond. Based on medical records, further internal clinic documents, correspondence and contemporary specialist articles, it identifies the patterns of perception, interpretation and action in the analysed context. The focus is on the interaction processes between the new method and the relations among various groups of actors, the clinical setting as well as institutional routines. Analytic psychotherapy resulted, so the argument goes, in a fundamental, largely unintended, change in psychiatric practices, which was driven by many other factors that influenced each other.

The book explores the early days of industry-sponsored clinical research in psychiatry. Examining how the clinic, patients, doctors, nursing staff, corporations, and authorities interacted, it reconstructs the experimental practices in a psychiatric hospital from 1940-80 whilst telling a larger story: the changing history of clinical trials.

In der Psychiatrischen Klinik Münsterlingen wurden über Jahrzehnte hinweg Psychopharmaka getestet. Dreh- und Angelpunkt dieser Versuche war der Psychiater Roland Kuhn, der mit diversen Pharmafirmen zusammenarbeitete. «Testfall Münsterlingen» untersucht, wie Industrie und Klinik, Patienten, Ärzte, Pflegepersonal und Behörden in der klinischen Forschung zusammenspielten. Die Stoffprüfungen werden historisiert und in die sich ebenfalls wandelnden Rahmenbedingungen eingeordnet. Welche Personen und Institutionen waren beteiligt, wer wusste was? Wie wurden Stoffe geprüft, welche Patientinnen und Patienten waren betroffen? Nach welchen Mustern wurden die Prüfsubstanzen verabreicht? Wann galten welche Werte, Richt linien und Normen? Welche Rollespielten sie in der Praxis? Ausgehend von diesen Fragen rekonstruiert «Testfall Münsterlingen» die Geschichte klinischer Versuche von 1940 bis 1980 und verortet die Thurgauer ‹Versuchsstation› in der zeitgenössischen Prüfungslandschaft.

Objective To assess whether Swiss residents aged 15-24 years follow current nutritional guidelines and whether differences exist according to gender and weight status. Design Cross-sectional national survey. Setting Switzerland. Subjects The 1786 participants (48·4 % women) were divided into overweight, normal weight and underweight. We used traditional BMI cut-offs for people ≥18 years of age (underweight = BMI < 18·5 kg/m2, normal weight = BMI ≥ 18·5 kg/m2 and <25 kg/m2, overweight = BMI ≥ 25 kg/m2) and age- and gender-appropriate tables for people aged <18 years, with BMI calculated from self-reported weight and height. We performed bivariate analyses by gender, and then bivariate and multivariate analyses comparing overweight to normal weight people (excluding underweight, n 129, 71·6 % women) regarding adherence to recommendations for fruit, vegetables, meat, fish and dairy products; physical activity; attitude towards body weight; depression, smoking and alcohol consumption. Results Overall, adherence to nutritional guidelines was low, particularly for vegetables and dairy products. Women had a higher adherence than men except for fish and dairy products. In the multivariate analyses, overweight women had a lower vegetable intake, were less satisfied with body weight and had more often been on a diet, whereas overweight men were less satisfied with body weight and wanted to lose weight more often than their normal weight peers. There were no significant differences for physical activity. Conclusions Overweight prevention programmes should target youth specifically by gender and promote an appropriate self-perception. Overweight women should be encouraged to eat more vegetables and men to be more sensitised on healthy food. Further research is needed to assess how to make nutritional guidelines more adaptable to young people's daily life