Agreementhas not yet been reached on the part played by emotional disturbance in the development of two common disorders, alopecia areata and chronic urticaria. In an attempt to assess the relationship of psychological stress to symptoms, a study was made of patients suffering from these two conditions in the out-patient department of St. John's Hospital for Diseases of the Skin. The effects of adeqiuate psychotherapy on symptoms were also studied. The study depended on the taking of a very long and detailed history of every case (when necessary, over several interviews of an hour each), together with a careful follow-up of patients, each of whom was seen at short, regular intervals over a period varying from 3 to 18 months, during interviews which lasted from 45 to 15 minutes. Most patients were followed up for more than one year.The time devoted to the patients seemed to he of extreme importance. Many were not able to discuss their difficulties in the first few interviews, but as time went on they were able to talk more freely. From the therapeutic point of view also, the time devoted to each pat;ent was of major importance. In many studies of this kind the psychotherapy offered may consist of brief interviews spaced widely over a varying period. In the present study it was, in certain cases, not possible to give adequate psychotherapy for the condition, the psychological disturbance being too profound.

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We consider a space-time variational formulation of a PDE-constrained optimal control problem with box constraints on the control and a parabolic PDE with Robin boundary conditions. In this setting, the optimal control problem reduces to an optimization problem for which we derive necessary and sufficient optimality conditions. We propose to utilize a well-posed inf-sup stable framework of the PDE in appropriate Lebesgue-Bochner spaces.Next, we introduce a conforming simultaneous space-time (tensorproduct) discretization in these Lebesgue-Bochner spaces. Using finite elements in space and piecewise linear functions in time, this setting is known to be equivalent to a Crank-Nicolson time stepping scheme for parabolic problems. The optimization problem is solved by a projected gradient method. We show numerical comparisons for problems in 1d, 2d and 3d in space. It is shown that the classical semi-discrete primal-dual setting is more efficient for small problem sizes and moderate accuracy. However, the simultaneous space-time discretization shows good stability properties and even outperforms the classical approach as the dimension in space and/or the desired accuracy increases.