What makes a hospital-based psychiatry training program successful? The experience of St Vincent's Hospital, Sydney.

Objectives: The purpose of this paper is to describe those features that have contributed to the popularity and success of the psychiatry training program at St Vincent's Hospital, Sydney, and to discuss the factors that potentially weaken the program and how these might be addressed.

Conclusions: The strengths of the psychiatry training program at St Vincent's Hospital are the high rate of recruitment of junior medical officers to psychiatry training, the provision of quality in-house teaching, the in-house provision of psychotherapy supervision and exam preparation, the positive influence of the chief psychiatry registrar, having enough trainees to alleviate the tension between training and service delivery, and the availability of a variety of 'extra', high-quality, professional development opportunities.

Lessons learned in developing community mental health care in Australasia and the South Pacific.

This paper summarizes the findings for the Australasia and Pacific Region of the WPA Task Force on Steps, Obstacles and Mistakes to Avoid in the Implementation of Community Mental Health Care. We present an overview of mental health services in the region; discuss policies, plans and programmes; chart progress towards achieving community-oriented services, and detail the lessons learned.

On representation of solids: a note.

Current theories of representation of 3-D objects assume that they are geometrical facsimiles of represented objects and, therefore, imply that various aspects of the representations are as concordant as are those of the objects themselves. Empirical data presented here question this as they show that subjects' choices of distinct views of objects are not mutually concordant. This being so, it seems unlikely that a facsimile representation of a solid yields a full description of the process of representation.

Mental Health Commissions: making the critical difference to the development and reform of mental health services.

Purpose Of Review: Several Mental Health Commissions (MHCs) have emerged in developed countries over recent years, often in connection with mental health reform strategies. It is timely to consider the types of MHC which exist in different countries, their characteristics which may contribute to making them more effective, and any possible limitations and concerns raised about them.

Recent Findings: The emerging literature on MHCs indicates, particularly with the wider types of MHCs, that they may contribute to the substantial enhancement of mental health resources and sustainability of services; mental health reform is much more likely to be implemented properly with an independent monitor such as a MHC which has official influence at the highest levels of government; and they can encourage, champion and monitor the transformation of services into more evidence-based, community-centred, recovery-oriented, consumer, family and human rights-focused mental health services.

WPA guidance on steps, obstacles and mistakes to avoid in the implementation of community mental health care.

This paper provides guidance on the steps, obstacles and mistakes to avoid in the implementation of community mental health care. The document is intended to be of practical use and interest to psychiatrists worldwide regarding the development of community mental health care for adults with mental illness. The main recommendations are presented in relation to: the need for coordinated policies, plans and programmes, the requirement to scale up services for whole populations, the importance of promoting community awareness about mental illness to increase levels of help-seeking, the need to establish effective financial and budgetary provisions to directly support services provided in the community.

Multiple-object tracking: enhanced visuospatial representations as a result of experience.

Research has demonstrated that individuals who routinely engage in complex visuospatial tasks (e.g., radar operators) show an enhanced ability to track multiple randomly moving targets.

Perception and the art of depiction of cylindrical objects.

Many works of art, notably those in the Byzantine tradition, contain depictions of upright cylindrical objects such that the outline of their top surfaces is incompatible with that of their bottom surfaces. We endeavour to elucidate whether this is a consequence of a painterly usage or a perceptual effect and conclude, on the basis of empirical evidence, that the latter cause is more likely.

Psychiatrically impaired medical practitioners: better care to reduce harm and life impact, with special reference to impaired psychiatrists.

Objective: The aims are to briefly review treatment outcomes for impaired practitioners, and to explore how preventive and early intervention, and the accessing of and retention within treatment systems for impaired medical practitioners, and particularly psychiatrists, could be improved to maximize the doctors' chances of full recovery and to minimize danger to self and others.

Methods: The literature on the treatment and care of medical practitioner impairment due to mental illness, and substance use, with special reference to impaired psychiatrists is briefly reviewed. The implications of deficiencies of usual clinical management of doctors impaired by mental illness and opportunities for improvement in services for them are explored, including the impact of the experience of being an impaired medical practitioner under psychiatric treatment.

Psychiatrically impaired medical practitioners: an overview with special reference to impaired psychiatrists.

Objective: This paper will define and describe impairment in medical practitioners due to mental illness, with special reference to the specialty of psychiatry, and then review the prevalence and identification of impaired practitioners.

Methods: The quantitative and qualitative evidence regarding the incidence and impact of medical practitioner impairment due to mental illness (and, to some extent, substance use), with special reference to impaired psychiatrists, is reviewed.

Results: Medical practitioner impairment due to mental illness has a severe impact on their lives and their families due to both the effects of the disorder and the experience of communal, professional and self stigma.

Enumeration: shape information and expertise.

This study examined the interaction between grouping information and expertise in a simple enumeration task. In two experiments, participants made rapid judgements about the number of items present in a visual display. Within each display, items were grouped into a canonical representation (e.

Hemispatial asymmetries in judgment of stimulus size.

Recent research has demonstrated a leftward bias in judgments of size. In the present experiments, hemispatial size bias was measured through simultaneous presentation of a circle and an ellipse varying in horizontal or vertical extent. A consistent leftward bias of horizontal size judgments (but not vertical) was obtained; at the point of subjective equality, the width of the objects that were presented in left hemispace was smaller than the width of the objects that were presented in right hemispace.

A lateralized bias in mental imagery: evidence for representational pseudoneglect.

One hundred right-handed healthy individuals were asked to imagine a familiar scene (the Piazza del Duomo, Milan) from two opposite viewpoints and report what they could see. For elements that should be visible from the participants' viewpoint, more elements were reported from the left side of the image than from the right, irrespective of view. These results establish that there is a lateralized bias in reporting the details in mental images--representational pseudoneglect.

Oppel-Kundt illusion in three-dimensional space.

A three-dimensional form of the Oppel-Kundt illusion was examined. Subjects viewed arrays consisting of two parallel rows of lights. For one group the rows consisted of equal numbers of lights (2, 3, or 4), while for a second group the row nearest the subject always had the greater number of lights.

Representing target motion: the role of the right hemisphere in the forward displacement bias.

Patients with left spatial neglect, patients with right hemisphere damage but no neglect, and a control group were asked to judge the final position of a series of moving targets. Both patient groups showed attentional deficits. All 3 groups demonstrated a forward displacement bias, overestimating the final target position along the object trajectory.

Explicit and implicit trust within safety culture.

Safety culture is an important topic for managers in high-hazard industries because a deficient safety culture has been linked to organizational accidents. Many researchers have argued that trust plays a central role in models of safety culture but trust has rarely been measured in safety culture/climate studies. This article used explicit (direct) and implicit (indirect) measures to assess trust at a UK gas plant.

Multiple-target tracking: A role for working memory?

In order to identify the cognitive processes associated with target tracking, a dual-task experiment was carried out in which participants undertook a dynamic multiple-object tracking task first alone and then again, concurrently with one of several secondary tasks, in order to investigate the cognitive processes involved. The research suggests that after designated targets within the visual field have attracted preattentive indexes that point to their locations in space, conscious processes, vulnerable to secondary visual and spatial task interference, form deliberate strategies beneficial to the tracking task, before tracking commences. Target tracking itself is realized by central executive processes, which are sensitive to any other cognitive demands.

Social norms and self-presentation: children's implicit and explicit intergroup attitudes.

Two studies examined whether social norms and children's concern for self-presentation affect their intergroup attitudes. Study 1 examined racial intergroup attitudes and normative beliefs among children aged 6 to 16 years (n=155). Accountability (i.

General Practice care of enduring mental health problems: an evaluation of the Wellington Mental Health Liaison Service.

Aims: To describe the development and evaluation of a primary care service for a population of mental health consumers who had previously been predominantly cared for by a specialist service.

Methods: Consumers were interviewed at regular intervals after entry to the programme. The Health of the Nation Outcomes Scale (HoNOS) and the Life Skills Profile (LSP) outcomes measures were used with consumers at intervals of 0,3,6,12 and 18 months after entry to the programme.

Understanding pretrial publicity: predecisional distortion of evidence by mock jurors.

Prejudicial pretrial publicity (PTP) constitutes a serious source of juror bias. The current study examined differences in predecisional distortion for mock jurors exposed to negative PTP (N-PTP) versus nonexposed control participants. According to work by K.

Word stem completion in young adults, elderly adults, and patients with Alzheimer's disease: evidence from cross-modal priming.

A cross-modality priming paradigm was used to examine the contribution of conceptual processing operations to performance on a word stem-completion task. Patients with Alzheimer's disease (AD), healthy elderly controls, and healthy young controls, studied words presented under two conditions, (1) visually and (2) orally, and were subsequently tested using a visual stem-completion task. AD patients were impaired relative to controls on stem completion.