The Golombok Rust Inventory of Marital State (GRIMS) is a new short (28 item) questionnaire for the assessment of the quality of a relationship. The GRIMS is a companion test to the Golombok Rust Inventory of Sexual Satisfaction (GRISS) which is in use in sex therapy and sexual dysfunction clinics and research. Its development and construction are described, together with details of item analysis and other psychomen-ic procedures. The scale, which can be used for either men or women, has good reliability (.90 for women and .92 for men). Content and face validity are good. Some evidence of discriminative validity is also given. The GRIMS will have clinical and research application for mam'age guidance and marital therapy clinics. Some further consideration is given to various differences between men and women in their perceptions of a good relationship.

Research in marital therapy has been disadvantaged by the lack of a good, short and recent psychometric questionnaire to objectively assess the state of a marriage for research, demographic and clinical purposes. The Golombok Rust Inventory of Marital State (GRIMS) is a companion questionnaire to the Golombok Rust Inventory of Sexual Satisfaction (GRISS), and concentrates on aspects other than the sexual in a dyadic relationship between two adults living together. It is a 28 item psychometrically constructed inventory designed to produce a single scale along which changes in a marriage may develop as marital therapy progresses. It has been shown to be valid for this purpose, and to have a good reliability.

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Fifty looked after young people and their carers were interviewed to elicit whether, intuitively, they considered the young person to have a mental health problem and when they would seek professional help. This intuitive judgement of need was compared with responses to a mental health screen, and specific depression and conduct disorder scales. The results suggest that carers perceived 70% of young people to have significant mental health need; high levels of depression (28%) and conduct disorder (34%) were also found. Carers were four times more likely to identify mental health needs, both intuitively and on the mental health screen, than young people did themselves. Two-thirds of carers were intuitively accurate in identifying mental health need in their young people, although fewer than half of those identified as having high needs were being seen by a mental health specialist. Of concern, 23% of carers failed to identify needs, subsequently identified by the mental health screen. Perceived familial burden predicted a high mental health needs screen outcome. Given the established risks to mental health for this population of young people, the utility of a systematic mental health screen is discussed.

This paper describes the use of a scale to assess the therapist's perception of the client and the client's perception of the therapist within behaviour therapy. A factor analysis revealed specific therapist and client factors which describe aspects of each participant's activity within sessions. The results suggest that the therapist's interpersonal manner is important in treatment and that attention should be given to this in training behaviour therapists.

Thirty-five phobic patients were assessed in order to investigate the specific therapist and patient factors operative within treatment. Although the factors were highly correlated, they did distinguish between those patients who benefited differentially from treatment.

The descriptive models of self-mutilation fall into three broad categories. The psychodynamic formulation; the second category includes the anxiety reduction model, the hostility model, the behavioral learning model and the appeal model; the third social learning category includes the group-epidemic model and aspects of the violence and punishment model. The three models support the view that there is no single cause or motive responsible for self-mutilating behavior. Having a number of factors in mind allows for flexibility and enables clinicians to test particular hypotheses during management and gives them the opportunity to alter intervention accordingly. The problems faced by self-mutilating patients are so varied that no single form of treatment is likely to be universally appropriate.

This paper describes a study comparing the Milan approach with problem solving family therapy. Twenty families were assigned to one of the treatments and data were collected assessing symptomatic (first order) and systemic (second order) changes. The results showed that families in both treatment groups achieved favourable changes in their presenting symptoms. Those families receiving the Milan approach showed a statistically significant improvement in second order changes compared with the problem solving group. Issues relating to treatment outcome, first and second order changes and methodology are presented.