ABSTRACT
'Four cheers for prevention!' declared J.N. Morris in a memorable polemic (Morris 1974), and one might suppose that clinical psychiatrists, daily confronted in their work by evidence of the intractable nature and disastrous consequences of many cases of established mental illness, would be more than ready to endorse his opinion. Yet a cursory glance through the leading modern textbooks suffices to show that prevention remains today a grossly undervalued theme in psychiatry. The best-known American compilation, for example, devotes only three of its 2,000 pages to this topic (Kaplan and Sadock 1985), while a prestigious British handbook fails to include the word 'prevention' in the index to any of its volumes.
