A survey of consumer satisfaction was carried out on one ward of the psychiatric unit of a district general hospital. Data were collected by questionnaire, the content of the questionnaire being guided by a number of semi-structured interviews. The information collected suggested many ways in which the patients' time in hospital could be made more comfortable and relaxed. Areas attracting particular concern were the food, noise, the provision of information and boredom. The various methods which can be used to elicit consumer views are described, and we have discussed the value and possible obstacles to users having more influence in the planning and running of mental health services.

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Deviant language behaviour is the primary basis for the clinical inference of thought disorder. Bleuler (1950), for example, emphasizes loose associations and disjointed utterances. Mayer-Gross, Slater, and Roth (1960) state that thought disorder is indicated by such conversation characteristics as ‘woolly vagueness', in-consequential following of side issues, direction by alliteration, analogies or clang associations, and the use of words out of context. However, psychological studies have typically used measures of disordered thinking derived from performance on categorization tasks. Such tasks do not obviously measure the abnormality which is definitive for the clinician. The study reported here was an attempt to relate measures of language effectiveness to overinclusive thought disorder.

The position of education chief was viewed as valuable to the medical student experience in the psychiatry clerkship, and the education chiefs felt that the position enhanced their professional and educational development.

Cameron (1938, 1939) suggested that schizophrenic thought disorder is largely the result of overinclusive thinking, which he defined as the inability to preserve conceptual boundaries. Payne, Matussek and George (1959) developed a battery of objective measures of overinclusive thinking, which they found differentiated between an acute schizophrenic and a neurotic control group. Payne and Hewlett (1960) found that a battery of tests of overinclusive thinking intercorrelated as expected. They were able to obtain a factor score from their overinclusion test battery which differentiated a group of acute schizophrenic patients from control groups of depressives, neurotics and normal subjects. Payne and Friedlander (1962), on the basis of this factorial study, suggested a short battery of three measures of overinclusive thinking consisting of the number of ‘Non-A’ or unusual responses to the Object Classification Test (Payne, 1962), the average number of words used in explaining the Benjamin Proverbs given under special 'stress free’ instructions, and the average number of objects classified together in the ‘handing over’ section of the Goldstein-Scheerer Object Sorting Test. This standard test battery has been the operational definition of overinclusive thinking in a number of studies. Only one study of the reliability of this test battery appears to have been carried out. Hawks and Payne (1971) report the correlations obtained from a group of 54 psychiatric inpatients who were retested after a 4-day interval. The test-retest correlation coefficient (uncorrected) obtained from the Combined Transformed score (Payne and Friedlander, 1962) was 0 · 87. The reliabilities of the individual tests ranged from 0·77 to 0·86.