In a study of 43 psychotics resident in a large metropolitan community of a non-Western country, scores of defined measures of illness outcome namely symptom score, social impairment score, change in occupational status score, indicate a generally poor prognosis in functional psychoses. This is congruent with the reports of similar studies in the industrialised countries and curiously at variance with the reports of better prognosis for several African and Asian patients. Our findings might be due to the fact that the population studied was exposed to significant western influence or contained poor prognosis illness variants. Alternatively, functional psychoses might run different courses among different ethnic groups within the same country. Our tentative findings should be base-stimulus for further enquiry.