Dementia may be a great family divider, particularly when there are cracks in family solidarity. The understanding of family conflict in dementia has ramifications for both clinical and medico-legal practice. These findings may encourage family-centered interventions which address family dynamics and interpersonal conflict. They may also assist in capacity assessments of persons with dementia who change legal documents because of family conflict.

It is concluded that the professional culture mirrors fundamental problems of gender relations that inhere in the larger socio-cultural context where they are expressed in various forms of sexual abuse and violence. A cultural change requires better education on issues of power and sexual politics.

Gender disadvantage within the professions significantly affects the development of women doctors, resulting in morbidity and less than optimal development. Paradoxically, for a profession primarily concerned with the study of the vicissitudes of human development, psychiatry in Australia and New Zealand has yet to articulate those issues which bear directly upon the development of its own members. Systemic problems are identified within the institutions of medicine and psychiatry which compromise the development of both female and male trainees and which must concern medical educators. Recommendations are made concerning the structure and content of training programmes, most particularly post-graduate psychiatry.

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Marital systems of agoraphobic women may reinforce or support the phobic condition and in some cases entire families are affected. Four case histories are presented in which agoraphobia and related disturbances and alcoholism are traced through three generations. Other studies are reviewed relating agoraphobia to alcoholism, examining the characteristics of parents and siblings and the marital adjustments of agoraphobic patients. A relationship with sex role stereotyping is suggested, particularly as relevant to the differing adjustments of males and females in these families. It is concluded that conflicts relating to separation/individuation and autonomy versus dependency and fear are crucial in these families and they are defended against by mechanisms of phobic avoidance, counterphobia and alcoholism.