Introduction. The role of family as a preventive, promotive, and curative agent is well documented in mental health studies. However, few attempts have been made to engineer the positive family mechanisms in enhancing psychiatric patients' role performance.Methods. This study is an endeavor to demarcate the effect of family education on social functioning of 170 schizophrenics and 174 patients with mood disorders. Solomon's four group design allowed patients from each category to be assigned into four groups. Key family members from experimental groups participated in a one day monthly programmer over a period of six months. Attitude towards mental illness, family environment and skills in management of patient's verbal and non-verbal behaviors as well as patient's adjustment ability within the family, community and work place constituted the focus of this study. While applying batteries of test, data pertaining to the aforementioned characteristics were obtained from the subjects 6 and 18 months after intervention which were subsequently compared with the baseline data.Findings. Comparing the baseline data with the data pertaining to other phases of intervention, one could observe a regressively progressive change in the families' attitudinal, cognitive and behavioral aspects, allowed by the patients' desirable social adjustment.Conclusion. These observations are congruent with earlier findings in the west, reinforcing the promising role of education in bringing about desirable changes in the family dynamic which can ensure better outcome for the psychiatric patients' illness.

Objectives: Body image is defined as image and feelings of an individual about size, form and parts of his or her body. The present study aimed to investigate the body image disturbance in a group of patients. Method: The present descriptive and cross-sectional study was conducted with a group of patients with diagnosis of schizophrenia (12 females and 15 males) and a group of subjects without any psychiatric disorder (15 females and 15 males). The two groups were matched for age, years of formal education, marital status, job and physical illness. Chi-Square analysis was used for statistical evaluation. Furthermore, Goodenough scoring system was utilized for estimating IQ, and McHover method was used for psychological assessment. Results: The results showed that the patient group drew persons with a number of errors in contrast to the control group (omission of parts, placing the parts in inappropriate positions and size, deformation of shapes of parts, etc.). Furthermore, patients and the control group were different in their scores for IQ in the Goodenough scoring system. Conclusion: The findings suggested that schizophrenic patients my have impaired body concept.

Schizophrenia is a sever psychological disorder. Because of intricacy and obscurity of the disease, various methods including cephalometry, have been suggested for its diagnosis. The diagnostic value of cephalometry is not well established. Therefore a case-control analytic study was performed to compare some cephalometric parameters (head form, face form and head circumference) between a sample of schizophrenic patients (n=196) and a normal control group (n=198). Two groups were matched in height, weight, sex, age and social level. The control group consisted of nonschizoprenic men and women with no family history of schizophrenia. Our results showed that there was no significant difference in face from between two groups. But the head circumference mean in case group was significantly less than that of the control group. Also hyperbrachiocephaly was more frequent in case group. Our results indicated that genetic factors may play a role in incidences of this differences. Also, these findings, might be used as a rough screening method.

Suicide among veterans is an important issue on which numerous studies have been carried out. In this research, the files of eighty two cases of successful veterans suicide referred to the Medical Council of Veterans Foundution during years 1985 up to 1999 have been studied. Personal information such as military, medical, and suicide background for each veteran was collected by means of a twenty eight questionnaire and data was analysed by SPSS software. Most of the suicides had happened among young, low-educated, poor, and unemployed veterans. The most common kind of suicides had been self-firing, self-hanging, and self-toxicating respectively. Their most common mental disorder had been depression and schizophrenia. Suicides often took place in summer and winter. Only one veteran had left a verbal will. Authors would like to state that in Spite of many other findings, there is a strong relation between financial problems and the suicides among veterans.