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Mark Mayfield, a Mississippi tea party leader and lawyer facing charges in connection with taking photos of Sen. Thad Cochran’s wife at her nursing home apparently committed suicide Friday morning. Police said that Mayfield’s wife, Robin, called 911 just after 9 a.m. to say her husband had shot himself. Officers arrived to find the 57-year-old lying on the floor of a storage room in his garage with a single gunshot wound to the head and a “large caliber revolver” with the body. Lt. John Neal of the Ridgeland Police Department told POLITICO that there was a note recovered, but he...

(Reuters) - Genes that increase the risk of a person developing schizophrenia may also increase the chance they will use cannabis, researchers said on Tuesday after studying more than 1,000 users of the drug. The results chime with previous studies linking schizophrenia and cannabis, but suggest the association may be due to common genes and might not be a causal relationship where cannabis use leads to increased schizophrenia risk. Cannabis is the most widely used illicit drug in the world, and its use is higher among people with schizophrenia than in the general population. "We know that cannabis increases the...

The left consistently blames guns for school shootings, while mostly ignoring the big elephant in the room: mental illness. Up until the 1960s, the severely mentally ill were locked up in psychiatric hospitals, for their own good and for the protection of society. The ACLU and the left changed that, by successfully suing to get them released out onto the streets. So now, they make up much of our homeless population. From there, many have predictably ended up in our prison system. The rate of mental illness in U.S. prisons is five times greater than in the regular population, and...

Look what NBC snuck in with a piece about the AMA ruling that cheerleading is now a sport last week: In other action Monday, the AMA said transgender people should be able to switch the sex designation on their birth certificates without having sex-change surgery. Most states make the operations a prerequisite. But the new AMA policy acknowledges that gender identity doesnÂ’t always match a personÂ’s birth anatomy. An AMA report says identification documents that are consistent with gender identity rather than anatomy is essential to basic social and economic functioning. Â… The new policy won praise from the National...

SEATTLE — The man charged with killing one student and wounding two others at a small Seattle college last week had stopped taking his medications because he "wanted to feel the hate," and he detailed his plans in a handwritten journal for two weeks before the attack, a prosecutor said Tuesday. "I just want people to die, and I'm gonna die with them!" Aaron Ybarra wrote the day of the shooting, King County Prosecutor Dan Satterberg said. Satterberg released new details of the allegations as he filed charges of first-degree murder, attempted murder and assault against Ybarra, 26. Satterberg is...

Levels of a small molecule found in humans and other primates are lower in the brains of depressed individuals, according to researchers at McGill University. In a study published in the journal Nature Medicine, Dr. Gustavo Turecki, a professor at Montreal's McGill University, and his team discovered that the levels of a tiny molecule may provide a marker for depression and help detect individuals who are likely to respond to antidepressant treatment. "Using samples from the Douglas Bell-Canada Brain Bank, we examined brain tissues from individuals who were depressed and compared them with brain tissues from psychiatrically healthy individuals,"says Turecki,...

John Hokanson Jr. is bipolar. The 33-year-old has been involuntarily committed several times, in California and in Arizona, and he has been in court-ordered outpatient treatment. Yet no red flags were raised when he purchased a surplus Army rifle from a Big 5 Sporting Goods store in Phoenix. In fact, the only reason we know this particular mentally ill man purchased firearm is because he’s deciding to tell his story, frustrated by what he sees as a “false dichotomy” with mass shootings framed as either a mental-health issue only or a gun issue only. Everyone agrees that guns should be...

- FrontPage Magazine - http://www.frontpagemag.com - No Gun Ever Killed AnyonePosted By Mallory Millett On June 3, 2014 @ 12:51 am In Daily Mailer,FrontPage | 72 Comments Editor’s note: Feminist writer and activist Kate Millet, the subject of the following article, is best known for her 1970 book, “Sexual Politics.” Reprinted from TruthRevolt.org.In the 1970′s I was alarmed to hear that my big sister, Kate Millett, who had serious mental health issues which had agonized my family and her friends for many years, was organizing a group called The Mental Patients’ Project in order to claim that the psychiatric community and...

Last week Americans were shocked and saddened by another mass killing, this one near a college campus in California. We all feel deep sympathy for the families of the victims. As usual, many people responded to this shooting by calling for new federal gun control laws, including the mental health screening of anyone attempting to purchase a firearm. There are a number of problems with this proposal. Federally-mandated mental health screenings would require storing mental health records in a government database. This obviously raises concerns about patient privacy and doctor-patient confidentiality, as well as the threat of identity theft....

Originally blue-eyed with blonde hair, he became interested in having plastic surgery after spending some time as an exchange student in Korea. He was inspired by how common plastic surgery is here. Xiahn, who asked not to be named to protect his family from Internet scrutiny, underwent 10 surgical procedures on his eyes, along with other less-invasive procedures, which cost him around $3,100. He also began wearing contact lenses to change his eye color.

A young man wrote a manifesto and went on a killing spree. This murderer, Elliot Rodger, ended up taking the lives of six people, seven if you include his own death. (I’ll wait for the coroner’s report to see whether it was self-inflicted or the result of return fire.) The massacres took place on May 23, in Isla Vista, California. Immediately pundits went into overdrive, and social media was filled with mostly ideology-based opinion. Most of the opinion seems, well, a bit off. The big word is “orthogonal” … to the facts. I offer, instead of my settled opinion, a...

You all know who he is. But I'm not going to repeat the name of the 22-year-old crazy person who stabbed or shot six young people to death near the UC Santa Barbara campus last week. I'm not going to quote from his insane 137-page "manifesto," either. It just spews his pathetic reasons for why he planned his murderous retribution against all the girls who had paid him no attention during his short and awful lifetime. You know about his pampered but mentally troubled and lonely life - growing up amid the movie glamour of planet Hollywood, seeing a therapist...

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA, is launching a $26 million program to help military personnel with psychiatric disorders using electronic devices implanted in the brain. The goal of the five-year program is to develop new ways of treating problems including depression, anxiety and post-traumatic stress disorder, all of which are common among service members who fought in Iraq or Afghanistan."We've seen far too many times where military personnel have neuropsychiatric disorders and there's very few options," says Justin Sanchez, a program manager at DARPA.DARPA is known for taking on big technological challenges, from missile defense to creating...

Feinstein questioned why Elliot Rodger was allowed to own guns, and ripped the NRA’s “stranglehold” on Congress. (Tom Williams/CQ Roll Call File Photo)Elliot Rodger’s shooting spree had Sen. Dianne Feinstein lamenting the “stranglehold” the NRA has over gun laws. “The deadly shooting in Isla Vista is heartbreaking,” the California Democrat said Sunday in a statement. “Schools should be places of safety, not where students fear for their lives.” Feinstein questioned why Elliot Rodger was able to legally obtain and keep his guns. “We must ask ourselves if an individual whose family called police with concerns about mental health, who is...

Only when cops entered Rodger’s nearby apartment did they find his first victims: three multiply-stabbed men whose names were withheld Saturday night, pending family notification. It remained unclear Saturday night if any of the three were Rodger’s two roommates. He had written in the manifesto that he would “have to kill” them so he could turn the place into “my personal torture and killing chamber.” “I will start luring people into my apartment, knock them out with a hammer, and slit their throats. I will torture some of the good looking people before I kill them, assuming that the good...

On May 7th CNN's John King played a video of Hillary Clinton saying, "We have to rein in what has become [an] almost article of faith, that anybody can have a gun anywhere, [at] any time." King quickly added, "She's talking in the context of mental health," but then he expressed obvious concern that this soundbite is going to make a great anti-Hillary commercial in southern Ohio, Florida, Colorado, and North Carolina, among other places. As Breitbart News reported earlier on May 7th, Hillary was not talking about mental health issues at this point but about "fully licensed" and "fully...

Two Dallas police officers have been indicted in the last two weeks for shooting and wounding residents in incidents where the initial police accounts were later contradicted by video. Cardan Spencer and Amy Wilburn were both charged with aggravated assault by a public servant. Spencer was indicted last week after shooting a 52-year-old man standing several feet away from him. A police report filed in the case initially claimed the man, Bobby Bennett, lunged at Spencer with a knife. A neighbor’s surveillance video camera captured video that showed Bennett was several feet from the officers and didn’t appear to move...

One of the most important jobs of the media is to be the so-called “fourth estate” — an unofficial fourth branch of government that holds the three official branches accountable. Ideally, this would take place when reporters provide a look at reality when politicians lie, despite pressure from the same politicians to not report the truth. However, there is another way to hold a politician accountable: Stop taking the politician seriously by not reporting what he or she said. I propose that Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) has long passed the point of “unseriousness” to “harmful to society,” and...

Fort Hood shooter was taking "prescription drugs for depression and anxiety". SSRIs? "Lopez was undergoing a variety of treatments for conditions including depression, anxiety and sleep disturbances, McHugh said. He was prescribed drugs that included Ambien, a sleep aid. Lopez was fully examined last month by a psychiatrist. There was no record of any sign he was likely to commit violence against himself or others, according to McHugh. "So the plan (going) forward was just to continue to monitor and treat him as deemed appropriate," he said." They say that he was "prescribed drugs" but only named one, Ambien, which...

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.