Patients' concepts of the causes of their functional psychoses were investigated by means of an open-ended question and a 30-item checklist. While patients, like professional experts, endorsed a multifactorial aetiological concept, they clearly favoured psychosocial explanations over biological ones. There was some variation according to diagnosis, with schizophrenic patients tending to attribute the development of their illness more often to esoteric influences or to their family environment and patients with affective psychoses assuming biological factors or psychosocial stress to be the cause of their illness. The aetiological concepts did not vary with the duration of illness. Our findings do not support the "psychological mindedness" hypothesis, which postulates that there is a greater inclination to adopt psychological explanations among women, younger people, the better educated or people from urban areas as compared with men, older people, the less educated or people from rural areas.
