Editing a journal in an era of publishing change.

I have been an editor for more than 23 years. Viewed in retrospect my earlier personal history had ominous markers for the future. These included editorial work for school and medical school magazines, and, as a psychiatric researcher, enjoyment of the writing of papers more than some of my colleagues, albeit with the usual features of painful struggle. Later I edited some psychiatric books (and found that hard labour). Then George Winokur and I were invited to start the new Journal of Affective Disorders, with its first issue at the beginning of 1979. Fifteen years later I accepted a similar invitation from Cambridge University Press, the large academic press of what was by then my home University, to succeed Michael Shepherd, a most distinguished editor, in the Editorship of Psychological Medicine.