Life events were evaluated for a period of one year prior to onset of obsessive compulsive disorder in 32 subjects with a maximum duration of illness of two years and compared with a matched healthy volunteer group. There was a significant excess of life events in the six months prior to the onset of the illness. Undesirable, uncontrolled life events in the area of health and bereavement occurred more commonly in obsessive compulsive disorder.
The tendency to perceive and report distress in psychological or somatic terms is influenced by various social and cultural factors, including the degree of stigma associated with particular symptoms. This study with the Explanatory Model Interview Catalogue demonstrates how quantitative and qualitative methods can be effectively combined to examine key issues in cultural psychiatry.
A prospective follow-up study of 60 randomly selected cases of closed adult civilian head injuries was conducted for three months from the time of head injury to assess the frequency, patterns, and factors related to post-traumatic psychiatric disturbances. Eighty per cent of the cases had a neuropsychiatric disturbance as assessed at 1 1/2 months. The commonest was post-concussional syndrome (43 per cent). The extent of social dysfunction was directly related to the severity of head injury. However, the total number of symptoms (largely subjective) correlated highly with pre-traumatic neuroticism. The inter-relatedness of organic and personality factors in the post-traumatic syndrome, and their predictive value, are discussed.
761 obsessions were recorded from 410 cases of obsessive-compulsive neurosis seen over a 10-year period. The obsessions were analysed according to form and content: 6 categories of form and 11 categories of content were delineated. Fear of contamination was the single most common theme, followed by thoughts of daily activities, thoughts about the past and fears of harm. The findings are discussed in the light of earlier literature.
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