Judging from Dr Pal's letter we failed totally to communicate adequately the purpose, the methodology or the conclusions of our paper on unusually persistent complainants. Dr Pal's letter comes, therefore, as a welcome opportunity to clarify our views.

We scrupulously avoided the term querulous paranoia. The unusually persistent complainants and their controls were selected by professionals working within the ombudsmen's offices, many of whom are legally trained. We are studying not courts and bureaucracies, but organisations whose mission is to assist complainants find a satisfactory resolution to their grievances. The organisational responses to the complaint, far from being ignored, were examined as the most likely precipitant of unusual persistence.

Dr Pal's passionate defence of civil liberties and attack on ‘misleading’ bureaucracies set on ‘silencing criticism’ seems misplaced as a criticism of a paper aimed at understanding and assisting those currently damaged by engagement within systems of complaints resolutions. Dr Pal clearly has a generous view of ‘normal reactions’, which incorporates behaviours involving a total fixation on a grievance to the point where individuals consume all their time, resources and energies in a futile pursuit that lays waste their own, and their families', lives. Dr Pal also presumably encompasses within the notion of normal overt and covert threats against complaints officers and their families.

Having our approach compared to Stalin, even a Stalin who Dr Pal seems to believe improved his behaviour post-war, might be considered intemperate, directed as it is at the authors of a paper which attempted to broaden the sympathies and concerns of mental health professionals for a distressed and disturbed group within our communities.