Suicide in England and Wales 1959-63 Part 1. The county boroughs

A five-year sample of suicide deaths in 82 county boroughs in England and Wales has been examined according to the age and sex of the victims. A number of demographic and other factors were chosen to test out the hypothesis that male suicides were more likely to be associated with other forms of violent death in the community and that female suicides would correlate with a number of variables measuring aspects of sociosexual life. In old age it was postulated that mental and physical illness would outweigh any environmental factors—apart from social isolation—as contributory causes to suicide by both sexes. The findings give limited support to the original hypothesis which needs to be checked by a sociomedical investigation of as many suicides as possible in a large number of towns

The psychiatric complications of parkinson's disease

Although James Parkinson in 1817 excluded mental symptoms from his original description of paralysis agitans, it has become clear that a wide range of psychiatric disorders can develop in patients with this disease. The principal conditions of dementia, depression and confusional syndromes, many of which are precipitated by drugs used in the treatment of parkinsonism, are reviewed. Particular attention is given to the frequency of dementia and its likely pathogenesis, to the nature of depression in Parkinson's disease and to the effects of different drugs, notably levodopa. A number of rare disorders characterised by parkinsonian and psychiatric symptoms are also discussed

Psychiatric complications of some basal-ganglia disorders

Many basal-ganglia disorders are complicated by psychological disturbances and most are aggravated by emotional tension. These relationships are considered in the context of parkinsonism, Sydenham's chorea, Huntington's disease, Wilson's disease and a number of generalized and localized varieties of dystonia