A service journal containing minutes of the conferences of the Commission with the officials of state hospitals, statistical data, announcements etc.

RD Laing remains one of the most famous psychiatrists of the last 50 years. In the 1960s he enjoyed enormous popularity and received much publicity for his controversial views challenging the psychiatric orthodoxy. He championed the rights of the patient, and challenged the often inhumane methods of treating the mentally ill. Based on a wealth of previously unexamined archives relating to his private papers and clinical notes, Portrait of the Psychiatrist as a Young Man sheds new light on RD Laing, and in particular his early formative years - a crucial but largely overlooked period in his life. The first half of the book considers Laing's intellectual journey through the world of ideas and his development as a psychiatric theorist. An analysis of his notebooks and personal library reveals Laing's engagement not only with psychiatric theory, but also with a wide range of other disciplines, such as philosophy, literature, and religion. This part of the book considers how this shaped Laing's writing about madness and his evolution as a clinician. The second half draws on a rich and completely unexplored collection of Laing's clinical notes, which detail his encounters with patients in his early years as a psychiatrist, firstly in the British Army, subsequently in the psychiatric hospitals of Glasgow, and finally in the Tavistock Clinic in London. These notes reveal what Laing was actually doing in clinical practice, and how theory interacted with therapy. The majority of patients who were to appear in Laing's first two books, The Divided Self and The Self and Others have been identified from these records, and this volume provides a fascinating account of how the published case histories compare to the original notes. There is a considerable mythology surrounding Laing, partly created by himself and partly by subsequent commentators. By a careful examination of primary sources, Allan Beveridge, both a psychiatrist and an historian, examines the many mythological narratives about Laing and provide a critical but not unsympathetic account of this colourful and contradictory thinker, who addressed questions about the nature of madness which are still being asked today. This book will be of interest to mental health workers and social historians alike as well as anybody interested in the philosophy of psychiatry.

Scarcely a day passes without the media detailing some form of human aggression, whether it be on its grandest scale in the form of war, random bombings and shootings in the streets, torture in a prison camp, murder by gangs, wife abuse resulting in the murder of the husband, or the physical abuse of children, sometimes resulting in their death. Frequently perpetrators of human aggression, when arrested and tried in court, resort to a psychiatric defense. But are all such aggressors indeed appropriately psychiatric patients? And if so, what are their particular diagnoses and how do these relate to aggression? Also of concern is aggression directed against self, as evidenced in the rising incidence of suicide among young people or the self-mutilation of patients suffering from certain personality disorders. Both violence directed outward and aggression toward oneself pose considerable challenges to clinical management, whether in the therapist's office or in the inpatient unit. Although we have not been able to find successful deterrents to aggression, a sizeable body of evidence does exist, certainly of a descriptive nature. Such data for psychiatric patients are scattered, however, and can be found in literatures as diverse as the biological, ethological, epidemiological, legal, philosophical, psychological, psychiatric, and crimi nological. Therefore, given the increased frequency with which mental health professionals encounter cases of violence in their day-to-day work, we believed it important that existing data be adduced in one comprehensive volume.