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It may be common for psychiatric patients who are Muslim to attribute their hallucinations or other symptoms to "jinn," the invisible, devilish creatures in Islamic mythology, researchers in the Netherlands have found. The findings demonstrate one way in which culture may influence how people perceive their psychotic symptoms, and could help Western psychiatrists better understand patients who have an Islamic background. Moreover, in today's connected world, patients may fuse the symbols from their own backgrounds with those of other cultures to explain their symptoms, study leader Dr. Jan Dirk Blom, an assistant professor of psychiatry at the University of Groningen,...

The latest research exploring the topic found that mice without serotonin still reacted to antidepressants. The data could change the way we think about treating the leading cause of disability worldwide.A lack in serotonin might not be entirely to blame for depression, new evidence suggests. It's widely believed that people with depression don't make enough serotonin-a messenger in the brain. But mice lacking serotonin did not exhibit symptoms of depression, reports a study in the journal ACS Chemical Neuroscience. When Prozac — which works primarily by increasing the amount of serotonin in the brain — was introduced in the 1980s,...

Germany’s Labor Minister Andrea Nahles has given her backing to an anti-stress law, announcing a study into workers’ mental health on Tuesday. Nahles told the Rheinische Post newspaper that she had commissioned the Federal Institute for Health and Safety at Work to come up with a report on the feasibility of a possible law to protect workers from stress caused by smartphones and constant contact with their bosses. “There is an undeniable link between having to be constantly available [for work] and the rise in mental illnesses,” she said, but she added it would be a challenge to implement any...

A New York couple faces thousands of dollars in fines for declining to rent out their family farm for a same-sex wedding celebration. The New York State Division of Human Rights fined Cynthia and Robert Gifford $13,000 for declining a request from a lesbian couple to rent the family barn for their ceremony. The Giffords have owned and operated Liberty Ridge Farm in for over 25 years. They believe marriage is the union of one man and one woman. Like many small farm families, they often open up their home to host public events, including weddings. In addition to the...

The group that has shown the highest increase in suicide rates is middle-aged men and women, for whom the number of suicides has risen by a horrifying 28.4 percent in a mere decade. The sharpest increase has been among men in their fifties, for whom the number has risen nearly 50 percent since 1999. Now nearly 30 per 100,000 American men in their fifties kill themselves. Suicides are increasing across the board, from college students to the elderly, but the increases for the middle-aged are shocking.

I’m not normally one to write a blog post about a dead celebrity, but then I suppose there is no such thing. There are only living celebrities, not dead ones. In death, wealth and prestige decay and we are brought into a new reality, the only reality there is or ever was — one which, for much better or much worse, doesn’t care at all about our popularity or our money. The death of Robin Williams is significant not because he was famous, but because he was human, and not just because he left this world, but particularly because he...

LOS ANGELES – They earn their living by making the masses laugh, but experts say comedians are all too often masking intense sadness behind those smiles.

The National Report, a parody website that typically does a very good job hiding the fact that its stories are fake, put one over on Gawker’s Jezebel site on Thursday. Jezebel’s Erin Gloria Ryan posted an article under the headline “Sarah Palin Interviews Guy Who Calls the President ‘Nigger Hitler’” that was based entirely on the fake story. According to the fake National Report account: Less than five hours after the launch of The Sarah Palin Channel, the fledgling online subscription-based network has landed itself in a major controversy, after a person being interviewed by Palin herself repeatedly referred to...

<p>DENVER (AP) — Officials at some Denver homeless shelters say the legalization of marijuana has contributed to an increase in the number of younger people living on the city’s streets.</p> <p>One organization dealing with the increase is Urban Peak, which provides food, shelter and other services to homeless people aged 15 to 24 in Denver and Colorado Springs.</p>

Before she was killed in the Newtown school massacre, 6-year-old Catherine Violet Hubbard raised money from returnable bottles and cans to buy bones for dogs at the pound and designed business cards for an imaginary animal shelter, listing herself as "caretaker." Her pretend animal shelter is now on track to become a reality as the state prepares to transfer 34 acres of a former psychiatric facility to a foundation raising money to build an animal sanctuary to honor the life of the little girl who was one of 20 first-graders killed in the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting.

Pop star Elton John called the Pope “wonderful” and said that Jesus would approve of marriage equality in an interview Sunday, the same weekend gay pride events occurred all over the world.Pop star Elton John called the Pope “wonderful” and said that Jesus would approve of marriage equality in an interview Sunday, the same weekend gay pride events occurred all over the world. Although Pope Francis does not support same-sex marriage, John praised the Pope’s attitude toward LGBT people as a sign of progress in an interview with Sky News, the AFP reports.

The first thing you'd probably ask Lisa Marteau is: Why would people want to hang from hooks pierced through their skin? The reasons are different for each person who participates in this activity known as body suspension, and the Boulder woman is careful not to make generalizations. She tiptoes around her words. She does not want to misrepresent the community — to further distort society's misconceptions and opinions about this unusual hobby.

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...