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Drawing on the work of Til Wykes, Lorna Gray and colleagues explain how patients with schizophrenia were encouraged to learn a range of skills, through practise and rehearsal, designed to improve their cognitive functioning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reviews ideas about depression and mourning from various quarters, particularly from psychoanalytic writings, from the work of George Brown on the social origins of depression and from some of the work in behavioural psychotherapy on guided mourning. Its essence is foreshadowed in a statement of Winnicott's: "If in an individual the depressive position has been achieved and fully established, then the reaction to loss is grief, or sadness. Where there is some degree of failure at the depressive position the result of loss is depression". [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is based on an invited contribution to the first APP conference on psychoanalytic psychotherapy services in Europe. I was asked to address the question “How can psychotherapists influence psychiatry?” within the overall title for the half-day session of “Psychiatry and Psychodynamics: Towards integration or splitting”. As a background to later discussion I began with a historical sketch of how we had arrived at the current situation in the UK with a specialty of psychotherapy, both separate from and yet still within psychiatry. I argued the need for a separate specialty to protect the space needed for psychotherapy in the face of the inevitable polarisations that occur within psychiatry. Some of the tensions between the different points of view are likened to those between masculine and feminine roles. This specialty might eventually emerge into or foster a new profession of psychotherapy but will still need to negotiate its position in relation to psychiatry. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

LIMKs are serine/threonine and tyrosine kinases responsible for controlling cytoskeletal dynamics as key regulators of actin stability, ensuring synaptic health through normal synaptic bouton structure and function. However, LIMK1 overactivation results in abnormal dendritic synaptic development that characterizes the pathogenesis of Fragile X Syndrome (FXS). As a result, the development of LIMK inhibitors represents an emerging disease-modifying therapeutic approach for FXS. We report the discovery of MDI-114215 ( 85 ), a novel, potent allosteric dual-LIMK1/2 inhibitor that demonstrates exquisite kinome selectivity. 85 reduces phospho-cofilin in mouse brain slices and rescues impaired hippocampal long-term potentiation in brain slices from FXS mice. We also show that LIMK inhibitors are effective in reducing phospho-cofilin levels in iPSC neurons derived from FXS patients, demonstrating 85 to be a potential therapeutic candidate for FXS that could have broad application to neurological disorders or cancers caused by LIMK1/2 overactivation and actin instability.

Various problems in relation to psychoanalytic theories of aggression are considered in a review which is by no means exhaustive but includes areas which have puzzled and interested the author. First to be considered is why the concept of aggression as a major drive was a relative late-comer in psychoanalysis; next the contentious concept of a 'death instinct' and some of the factors in Freud's lifetime which may have contributed to both. Then it is suggested that we seem to have theories of aggression which might be called primary or secondary in two different senses. First is the question whether aggression is innate or secondary to frustration. In another sense, primary and secondary theories of aggression seem to survive paralleling Freud's original primary and secondary theories of anxiety. In this sense the primary theory survives as an explanation of psychosomatic disorder. Lastly, the link between suicide and murder is considered and the turning of aggression against the self in depression and self-destructive attacks.

The fear of dependence is considered as it is experienced by therapists and patients in therapeutic relationships. The concept of dependence is briefly reviewed in the psychoanalytic literature of both East and West. A clinical illustration is given of the fear of dependence in a male patient. It is suggested that the Western ideal of independence is a myth which especially ignores the reliance on internal others.

The concept of termination is reviewed and reconsidered. It is suggested that the expression itself is a curiously inappropriate term with its negative and finite connotations which fail to convey the positive hopes for a new beginning that normally surround the end of a satisfactory analysis. The single word termination does not distinguish the external reality of interruption of visits to the analyst from the internal continuation of the analytic process. Moreover, it ignores the awkward circumstance that analysts on qualification often continue to meet their own analyst. Maybe termination remains the appropriate word for a forced or premature ending.

The records of all deliberate self poisoners seen at Auckland Hospital in a 15 month period in 1971-72 were examined. There were 550 patients of whom 35 presented twice and six three times. Five persons died. A subgroup of 100 was interviewed personally and compared with 100 orthopaedic outpatients matched for age and sex. Self poisoners are more likely to be aged 15-24, of female sex, have seen a psychiatrist, self poisoned previously, come from disturbed family and marital backgrounds and show other signs of moderate maladjustment. Drugs taken are usually prescription drugs obtained legitimately with psychiatric ones particularly hypnotics and anxiolytics, predominating. The act is usually impulsive and not designed to result in death. Most patients require only outpatient treatment. It is suggested that the term attempted suicide is a misnomer in most cases and the less misleading self poisoning replace it.