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FORT HOOD, Texas (AP) — An Iraq War veteran being treated for mental illness was the gunman who opened fire at Fort Hood, killing three people and wounding 16 others before committing suicide, in an attack on the same Texas military base where more than a dozen people were slain in 2009, authorities said. Within hours of the Wednesday attack, investigators started looking into whether the man’s combat experience had caused lingering psychological trauma. Fort Hood’s senior officer, Lt. Gen. Mark Milley, said the gunman had sought help for depression, anxiety and other problems.

HARTFORD — Mary Jo Andrews, Carol Poehnert and several other West Hartford mothers of children with mental-health problems had quietly met for eight years, usually over dinner, to share their experiences and frustrations, and to trade tips and shortcuts learned while navigating the treatment system. Then the Sandy Hook School tragedy happened in December 2012. "And we decided we needed to get out and do some advocating,'' Andrews told 70 parents and health care professionals at a forum at the Institute of Living Wednesday evening. It is the first of a handful of planned sessions — part of an effort...

Sleep loss may be more serious than previously thought, causing a permanent loss of brain cells, research suggests. In mice, prolonged lack of sleep led to 25% of certain brain cells dying, according to a study in The Journal of Neuroscience. If the same is true in humans, it may be futile to try to catch up on missed sleep, say US scientists. They think it may one day be possible to develop a drug to protect the brain from the side-effects of lost sleep. …

Attorney General Eric Holder said at a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing today that President Obama is open to using an executive action to push through gun-control and/or associated mental health measures that haven’t found approval in Congress. Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.), one of the top proponents of new gun-control measures in Congress, noted that Obama only made a “very brief” reference to gun violence in his State of the Union address. “But I hope, and I hope you will join me in the view that the president remains completely committed to ending gun violence in this country, adopting common sense...

We tend in modern times to link our notions of happiness and inner well-being to circumstances and happenstance. And thus happiness will be found when the things of this world are arranged in the way and quantity we like. If we just get enough money and creature comforts, we will be happy and have a better sense of mental well being.And yet, it remains true that many can endure difficult external circumstances and yet remain inwardly content, happy and optimistic. Further, many who have much are still not content and are beset with great mental anguish, anxiety and unhappiness. Ultimately...

NEW YORK – The underlying assumption that has led to the increasing legitimization of same-sex marriage is now fueling a growing effort in academic circles to mainstream pedophilia. Once considered taboo, psychologists are beginning to walk down the same path LGBT activists established more than 50 years ago, insisting that pedophilia is an inborn “sexual orientation,” not a learned sexual behavior. If people are born with a sexual attraction to minors, the argument goes, their “orientation” should be accepted as normative and not stigmatized. James Cantor, Ph.D., a clinical psychologist in the Law and Mental Health Program at the...

From pennlive.com, we find the latest bit of judicial folly: Pennsylvania State Trooper Michael L. Keyes is in an odd situation. When on duty, he can carry a gun. Yet while off duty, he is barred by law from possessing any firearms, because seven years ago he suffered from deep depression, repeatedly tried to kill himself by taking drugs and was involuntarily committed for mental health treatment. This reminds me quite of bit of Dick Heller, of D.C.  v. Heller, who was trusted to carry a gun to guard government buildings in the District of Columbia, but not as...

Wilmington, Del., has a big problem: Large groups of black people are going crazy. And this collective “mental illness” is causing record levels of crime and gun violence in this mostly black town of 70,000. That is the official diagnosis of the city council, which, by unanimous agreement earlier this month, asked the Centers for Disease Control to investigate a wave of psychological mayhem that has turned this historic and once-charming city into an unrecognizable husk of its former self. Chief diagnostician of this crisis in public health is city council member Hanifa G.N. Shabazz: “There is a well known...

The families of Newtown, Conn., have a simple request on the anniversary of the tragic shooting that took 26 lives, 20 of them children, a year ago at Sandy Hook Elementary School: Honor the victims by performing an act of kindness on Saturday. We'll try to honor that request, and we hope others do, too. But, frankly, there's more that needs doing. Twenty-six died on Dec. 14, 2012, in Newtown, and there have been other mass shootings since. But when we honor those victims, let's also honor the many other victims of gun violence in our communities. In Milwaukee alone...

Vice President Joe Biden is pledging more funding for mental health as the first anniversary of the Newtown, Conn., school shooting approaches. The White House says $100 million will become available to increase access and quality of mental health services. Biden will announce the funds Tuesday when he meets with relatives of Newtown victims at the White House.

<p>In a recent study of U.S. presidents' personality traits, Lyndon Johnson ranked highest in grandiose narcissism.</p> <p>While it frequently gets a bad rap, grandiose narcissism may predict both positive and negative leadership behaviors, according to a group of researchers who published a paper in October in Psychological Science.</p>

Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius on Friday said that new requirements imposed on insurance companies by Obamacare will require those companies to treat mental illness and addiction that same as physical illness, creating "the largest behavioral health expansion in a generation."

ven as stories pour in of Americans facing steeply higher health insurance premiums and canceled coverage, Team TISI +0.13% Obama just imposed new regulations that will make those problems worse. It’s almost like they can’t help themselves. On Friday, Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius announced new regulations mandating health insurers cover mental and behavioral health to the same extent they cover physical health care. A “mental health parity” mandate was passed by Congress in 2008, but Obama officials claim health insurers aren’t fully complying. (You’ll just have to overlook the irony of the Obama administration, which has postponed...

The Obama administration, fresh off an apology from President Obama to Americans who are losing their current health plans under his new health care law, forged ahead Friday with rules that place mental health and substance abuse care on equal footing with medical and surgical benefits. Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius announced the “historic” step in Atlanta alongside former first lady Rosalynn Carter — a longtime champion for mental health research — in a nod toward the generation-long effort to make sure millions of Americans with behavioral health problems get the same care as patients with physical issues....

BOSTON (AP) — Vice President Joe Biden planned to join Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius and former U.S. Rep. Patrick Kennedy for a forum on policies that affect people with mental illness, intellectual disabilities or addiction. The two-day event marks the 50th anniversary of President John F. Kennedy's signing of the Community Mental Health Act. The legislation, the last signed by Kennedy before his assassination, helped transform the way people with mental illness are treated and cared for in the United States.

If you move the view to the side, however, you can see the top and bottom parts of the brain, demarcated largely by the Sylvian fissure, the crease-like structure named for the 17th-century Dutch physician who first described it. The top brain comprises the entire parietal lobe and the top (and larger) portion of the frontal lobe. The bottom comprises the smaller remainder of the frontal lobe and all of the occipital and temporal lobes. Our theory's roots lie in a landmark report published in 1982 by Mortimer Mishkin and Leslie G. Ungerleider of the National Institute of Mental Health....

According to liberal source "Politico", President Obama held a meeting on October 8, with "conservative journalists" Charles Krauthammer, Paul Gigot, Kathleen Parker, Byron York, and Robert Costa. The meeting was described as "off-the-record". When questioned about that meeting the next evening by Bret Baier of Fox News, Krauthammer gave no real information. This is worrisome news because Krauthammer graduated from Harvard Medical School in 1975 with his MD and was board certified in psychiatry by the American Board of Psychiatry and Neurology in 1984. As recently as 2009, President Obama called upon Krauthammer's medical stature, inviting Krauthammer to a signing...

The Department of Health and Human Services has awarded $556,000 to Northwestern University's Feinberg School of Medicine for an LGBT mental health internship program. “Lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) individuals experience unique health disparities. As a group, LGBT adults experience more mood and anxiety disorders, an elevated risk for suicide, and substance use as compared with heterosexual adults. LGBT people are more frequently the targets of stigma, discrimination, and violence because of their sexual- and gender-minority status,” the grant abstract said. “LGBT adults have higher rates of smoking, alcohol use, and substance use than heterosexual adults, which leads to...

In Bradley Manning Is Not a Woman, Kevin Willamson makes a case that feeling like a transsexual – that is, that one is either a man in the body of a woman or vice-versa – should be regarded as a mental illness to be treated by therapy rather than with sex-reassignment surgery. The article surprised me by presenting a coherent case for this position that I cannot dismiss as garden-variety social-conservative chuntering. I found the parallel with what Willamson calls BIID particularly troubling. If we treat people who desire to electively amputate their own arms and legs as mentally ill,...

As a Second Amendment organization representing 375,000 members, we are writing to express our concern over Health And Human Services’ (HHS) proposed rule that was printed in the April 23rd, 2013 issue of the Federal Register. These regulations would, by executive fiat, waive all federal privacy laws and encourage doctors to report their patients to the FBI. Please understand a couple of things: First, the standard which a doctor would use to turn in a patient is embodied in Clinton-era ATF language and in the anti-gun Veterans Disarmament Act of 2007. Specifically, a doctor would report a patient if he...