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Although first rank symptoms focus on positive symptoms of psychosis they are shared by a number of psychiatric conditions. The difficulty in differentiating bipolar disorder from schizophrenia with affective features has led to a third category of patients often loosely labeled as schizoaffective. Research in schizophrenia has attempted to render the presence or absence of negative symptoms and their relation to etiology and prognosis more explicit. A dichotomous population is a recurring theme in experimental paradigms. Thus, schizophrenia is defined as process or reactive, deficit or non-deficit and by the presence or absence of affective symptoms. Laboratory tests confirm the clinical impression showing conflicting responses to dexamethasone suppression and clearly defined differences in autonomic responsiveness, but their patho-physiological significance eludes mainstream theory. Added to this is the difficulty in agreeing to what exactly constitutes useful clinical features differentiating, for example, negative symptoms of a true deficit syndrome from features of depression. Two recent papers proposed that the general and specific cognitive features of schizophrenia and major depression result from a monoamine-cholinergic imbalance, the former due to a relative muscarinic receptor hypofunction and the latter, in contrast, to a muscarinic hypersensitivity exacerbated by monoamine depletion. Further development of these ideas will provide pharmacological principles for what is currently an incomplete and largely, descriptive nosology of psychosis. It will propose a dimensional view of affective and negative symptoms based on relative muscarinic integrity and is supported by several exciting intracellular signaling and gene expression studies. Bipolar disorder manifests both muscarinic and dopaminergic hypersensitivity. The greater the imbalance between these two receptor signaling systems, the more the clinical picture will resemble schizophrenia with bizarre, incongruent delusions and increasingly disorganized thought. The capacity for affective expression, by definition a non-deficit syndrome, will remain contingent on the degree of preservation of muscarinic signaling, which itself may be unstable and vary between trait and state examinations. At the extreme end of muscarinic impairment, a deficit schizophrenia subpopulation is proposed with a primary and fixed muscarinic receptor hypofunction.

The genomic profile of bipolar disorder and schizophrenia overlap and both have a common dopaminergic intracellular signaling which is hypersensitive to various stressors. It is proposed that the concomitant muscarinic receptor upregulation differentiates the syndromes, being marked in bipolar disorder and rather less so in schizophrenia. From a behavioral point of view non-deficit syndromes and bipolar disorder appear most proximate and could be reclassified as a spectrum of affective psychosis or schizoaffective disorders. Because of a profound malfunction of the muscarinic receptor, the deficit subgroup cannot express a comparable stress response. None -theless, a convergent principle of psychotic features across psychiatric disorders is a relative monoaminergic-muscarinic imbalance in signal transduction.

Typologies of sleep problems have usually relied on identifying underlying causes or symptom clusters. The purpose of this paper is to explore the value of using the patient's own reasons for sleep disturbance.

Using secondary data analysis of a nationally representative psychiatric survey the patterning of the various reasons respondents provided for self‐reported sleep problems were examined. Over two thirds (69.3 per cent) of respondents could identify a specific reason for their sleep problem with worry (37.9 per cent) and illness (20.1 per cent) representing the most commonly reported reasons. And while women reported more sleep problems for almost every reason compared with men, the patterning of reasons by age showed marked variability. Sleep problem symptoms such as difficulty getting to sleep or waking early also showed variability by different reasons, as did the association with major correlates such as worry, depression, anxiety and poor health.

While prevalence surveys of “insomnia” or “poor sleep” often assume the identification of an underlying homogeneous construct, there may be grounds for recognising the existence of different sleep problem types, particularly in the context of the patient's perceived reason for the problem.

A typology based on reasons presents a different snapshot of the landscape of insomnia. Using patient's reasons to underpin a sleep nosology is an alternative way of sub‐dividing patients' symptoms which has some face validity given the “subjective” associations between reasons and symptoms.

The purpose of this paper is to provide a summary of main outcomes of the 10th EAMHID International Congress and a critical overview of some key contributions.

A discussion on the impact of the neurodevelopmental perspective on mental health care achievements and failures in the field of intellectual disability (ID) and autism spectrum disorders (ASD).

The considerable progress in the field of mental health care for people with ID that has been made in the last 30 years and that is reflected through the 350 papers presented in this Congress represents the continuation of the work of great pioneers, such as Frank Menolascino, Felix Platter or William I. Gardner, who have been honoured by the EAMHID in the naming of the congress rooms, and the dedication of the poster award. The neurodevelopmental perspective was confirmed to be the current most valued conceptual framework to explain relations across systems and to support multi-level, transnosographic, life-long, interdisciplinary approaches in the production of aetiological insight and good-quality intervention for mental health problems; on the other hand it might determine a premature abandonment of the traditional nosology and the appearance of very broad spectrum conditions covering the full range of psychopathology. Also psychopharmacology was extensively considered, with the explicit aim to raise the attention of researchers and clinicians on this neglected topic. Unfortunately, adults with ID/ASD are still deprived of the right to receive treatments that are based on strong evidence, as it is for the general population.

This editorial outlines the second part of a special issue that offers a comprehensive and varied collection of papers from the contributions to the 10th International Congress of the EAMHID.

The purpose of this paper is to critically discuss how the psy-sciences have been, and continue to be, typified by some critics, as colonizers and are credited with Imperialistic motivations. However, rarely are these critiques developed beyond a pejorative characterisation.

This paper reviews the criticisms of psychiatry as colonial and outlines the tensions in taking different frames of reference in the mental health field, before going on to suggest theoretical and research perspectives arising from postcolonial theory that might advance these critical positions more coherently and the implications of doing so.

This study suggests an engagement with humanities-based methods and fields such as postcolonial scholarship.

This argument is timely, especially given recent controversies over the publication of DSM5, the scaling up agenda for mental health in the Global South and increased attention to the agenda of Big Pharma.

Postcolonial intersections with psy-science remains a relatively undeveloped area in the critical literature.

This paper has two purposes. One is to examine the ways mentally disabled children were disciplined and cared for in Berlin, Germany/Prussia, at the end of the 19th century, by considering the way the architecture of the asylum affected the practices within it. The second purpose is to examine the manner in which the practices at the Dalldorf Asylum, especially the administrative paperwork, fabricated and stabilized the medico-pedagogical category of “feeble-mindedness”.

This paper engages with reflections on asylum architecture and its connection to disciplining bodies as shown in Disability History and linking these insights to recent scholarship from the field of Science and Technology Studies on the fabrication of knowledge through observation. Drawing on microhistory as methodology it examines the fabrication of “feeble-mindedness” with and within the Dalldorf Asylum, focusing on architecture and design as well as administrative practices.

The analysis of the asylum's architecture reveals how certain ideas of hygiene and control derived from 19th century psychiatry, along with personal attentiveness and individualized learning were incorporated into the building, creating the notion of a “feeble-minded child” as being simultaneously dangerous and in danger. The paper further shows how the professionals involved were struggling with diagnosing these children, further showcasing that the space as well as the categorization of children, oscillating between psychiatry and pedagogy, has to be understood as contested.

This paper engages findings on the disciplining structures organizing everyday life within the asylum with concepts of fabricating knowledge as central to science studies. The Dalldorf Asylum, the earliest state-funded asylum for mentally disabled children in Germany and largely understudied, is used as the main research object. A microhistorical approach allows to make visible the intricate yet mundane practices involved in stabilizing the category of “feeble-mindedness”.

Since the Jellinekian Foundation of modern alcohol studies 75 years ago, no one has yet systematically studied the role of his ethnographic studies, his university attendance and engagement in psychoanalytic work leading to the birth of his first book (published in 1917), which applied an ethnographic approach. The purpose of this paper is to uncover and show the ethnographic, experimental psychological and psychoanalytic roots in Jellinek’s different models of alcohol problems, from the conventional medical one, though the Alcoholics Anonymous-inspired concept, to the species of alcoholism theory.

Using the data from their research in the archives of Budapest, Berlin, Leipzig and Grenoble, the authors examine Jellinek’s scientific output in alcohol studies. They focus on data related to Jellinek’s activity in statistics, ethnography including field work and the business model of psychoanalysis.

Drawing from various traditions of science, Jellinek acquired considerable sources of knowledge with the help of his friends and teachers during his formative years, which later led him to renew and transform his models of alcohol problems. New data on Jellinek’s personal history, a by-product of the archival research, is also presented.

The Jellinekian heritage, including his cross-fertilisation approach, represents a vast reserve for addiction science.

This paper not only adds to the understanding of the history of addiction, but might also lead to a rearranging of our knowledge about the founder of the field.

Knowledge, as represented in the history of ideas and in studies of knowledge paradigms and bibliographical structures, appears coherent and rationalistic. By examining the work of the French historian and philosopher Michel Foucault, this view is discussed. Special attention is given, in any cultural or scientific interpretation of an age, to the need to get behind the dominant or hegemonistic body of institutionalized and documented knowledge. We need to investigate the assumptions and underlying influences on the ways in which discourse embody and shape meanings. What preconceptually underpins, we might ask, what people know as knowledge. Important links between language, truth and power are examined, and these are major concerns for Foucault. It is argued that Foucault's ‘archaeological’ and ‘genealogical’ insights into the nature of warranted knowledge are crucial for an understanding of the communication process and the knowledge‐organizing activities of information specialists.

Addresses how the life sciences have concentrated on the pathology of aging while ignoring the biocultural aspects of health in the process of growing older. Argues that growing older is a dynamic cognitive, biological and cultural coauthoring of health rather than a hopeless unfolding of progressive pathology. Proposes that this fragmented concept of aging precludes operationalizing and understanding the cultural markers that affect longevity. These cultural milestones, or biocultural portals include middle age markers, retirement markers, perceived wisdom, sexuality, status in the community, transcendental beliefs, sense of empowerment vs helplessness and any other biocultural phase in human development. Suggests that the biocultural portals define and trigger the phase transitions of life as well as influence how they are accommodated. For example, the markers for middle age established by a culture, strongly influence the cognitive and biological expectations for the second half of life.