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Do you bite your nails? For 30 years, I did. We nail biters can be "pathological groomers" — people for whom normal grooming behaviors, like skin picking or hair pulling, have become virtually uncontrollable. But psychiatry is changing the way it thinks about pathological grooming, and these changes will be reflected in the American Psychiatric Association's DSM, short for Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. A new version is coming out early next year, and it puts pathological grooming in the same category as another disorder you've probably heard of: obsessive compulsive disorder, or OCD. This rethinking gives pathological...

It would be laughable if it weren't tragic. This week Surgeon General Regina Benjamin introduced a plan to stem the nation's growing suicide rate without addressing the nation's growing use of suicide-linked drugs. Antidepressants like Prozac and Paxil, antipsychotics like Seroquel and Zyprexa and anti-seizure drugs like Lyrica and Neurontin are all linked to suicide in published reports and in FDA warnings. (Almost 5,000 newspaper reports link antidepressants to suicide, homicide and bizarre behavior.) Asthma drugs like Singulair, antismoking drugs like Chantix, acne drugs like Accutane and the still-in-use malaria drug Lariam, are also linked to suicide. The US's suicide...

I am sorry to report that Thomas Szasz, the great libertarian critic of coercive psychiatry, the "therapeutic state," and the war on drugs, died over the weekend at his home in Manlius, New York. He was 92.

The former Marine who was detained by the federal government over Facebook posts critical of the government is being held in a psychiatric ward, Peter Bacqué of the Richmond Times-Dispatch reports.

CHICAGO — U.S. Rep. Jesse Jackson Jr., a Chicago Democrat who took a hushed medical leave two months ago, is being treated for bipolar disorder, the Mayo Clinic announced Monday. The Rochester, Minn.-based clinic specified his condition as Bipolar II, which is defined as periodic episodes of depression and hypomania. Hypomania is a less serious form of mania. "Congressman Jackson is responding well to the treatment and regaining his strength," the clinic said in a statement...

MILWAUKEE (AP) — Is a gun like a virus, a car, tobacco or alcohol? Yes say public health experts, who in the wake of recent mass shootings are calling for a fresh look at gun violence as a social disease. SNIP The need for a new approach crystallized last Sunday for one of the nation's leading gun violence experts, Dr. Stephen Hargarten. He found himself treating victims of the Sikh temple shootings at the emergency department he heads in Milwaukee. Seven people were killed, including the gunman, and three were seriously injured. It happened two weeks after the shooting that...

Accused Colorado shooter James Holmes, charged with murder over a shooting rampage last month at a movie theater in a Denver suburb, has a "mental illness" and tried to get help before the shooting, his defense attorney said in court on Thursday. Holmes, who is accused of opening fire at a midnight screening of "The Dark Knight Rises" in the suburb of Aurora, was present in a hearing in which a judge weighed a request by 20 media organizations to unseal documents related to his case. During the hearing, Holmes' public defender, Daniel King, repeatedly made references to his client's...

TUESDAY, Aug. 7 (HealthDay News) -- Use of powerful antipsychotic medications such as Abilify and Risperdal to control youngsters with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and other behavior problems has skyrocketed in recent years, a new study finds. Antipsychotics are approved to treat bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, other serious mental problems and irritability related to autism. But they don't have U.S. Food and Drug Administration approval for ADHD or other childhood behavior problems, and their use for this purpose is considered "off label." "Only a small proportion of antipsychotic treatment of children (6 percent) and adolescents (13 percent) is for FDA-approved clinical indications,"...

There is no inherent thing in a person that prevents them from carrying out acts of killing, or mass destruction. The thing that restrains a person is their upbringing. The morality and ethics that they are taught when they are growing up. That fact becomes all the more important when they enter a field of study where they are dealing with the very perception of reality that those morals are based on. There has been a long standing problem in research. That is the tendency for the researcher to go native. A researcher has to study the interaction from an...

DENVER -- The psychiatrist treating accused Aurora theater gunman James Holmes was so concerned about his behavior that she notified other members of the University of Colorado Behavioral Evaluation and Threat Assessment, or BETA, team that he could potentially be a danger to others, sources with knowledge of the investigation told CALL7 Investigators.

James Holmes came to the attention of the threat assessment committee at the University of Colorado but no further action was taken because he left the school more than a month before the attack that killed 12 and injured 58, sources told ABC News. ABC News has learned that Dr. Lynne Fenton, the psychiatrist who was treating Holmes, 24, at the school, was also a key member of the university's threat assessment team. The group of experts were responsible for protecting the school from potentially violent students. KMGH-TV, ABC News' affiliate in Denver, reported exclusively that, according to sources, by...

The suspected Batman massacre gunman was seeing a psychiatrist specialising in schizophrenia before the attack that killed 12 in Colorado, court documents show. The motion named Dr Lynn Fenton as defence lawyers sought to gain access to a package James Holmes had mailed to her prior the July 20 mass shooting, which also wounded 58 people. Reports surfaced on Wednesday that Holmes - who recently dropped out of the University of Colorado - had sent a notebook to a university psychiatrist that included details and drawing of his plans to kill people. There were conflicting reports about whether the package...

Illinois Congressman Jesse Jackson Jr., whose whereabouts haven't been disclosed since he mysteriously took a medical leave several weeks ago, is being treated for depression at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn., according to a statement Friday from the hospital. Jackson is undergoing an extensive inpatient evaluation for depression and for gastrointestinal issues, according to the statement, which also provided the first details about his medical condition. But it provided no details about where the congressman, the son of civil rights leader Jesse Jackson, had previously been staying. [Snip] The timing of [Jackson's] leave has raised questions, in part because...

THE Rev. JESSE JACKSON is devastated over the headline-making mystery illness that’s struck his son, U.S. Congressman Jesse Jr. – and The ENQUIRER has learned the shocking cause of the tragedy. “At first we thought he was sim­ply exhausted,” said a source close to the family. “But after five weeks of extensive evaluation, doctors diagnosed Jesse Jr. with bipolar disorder.” The serious mental condition is triggered by chemical imbalances in the brain, which propels sufferers from manic highs to depressive lows. Some insiders point the finger of blame squarely at a gastric bypass operation the 47-year-old poli­tician underwent in 2004...

The shooting suspect in the Colorado theater rampage was seeing a university psychiatrist specializing in schizophrenia in the weeks before the July 20 attack, according to court records released Friday. James Holmes was seeing Lynne Fenton, the director of student mental health services at the University of Colorado and a medical school professor. Holmes was a first-year graduate student in a neuroscience Ph.D. program. [Snip] Fenton, medical director of the counseling facility, has written numerous papers and launched research in the area of schizophrenia. She did not respond to calls to her home and office.

AURORA, Colo. – James Holmes, the accused gunman in last Friday's midnight movie massacre in Colorado, mailed a notebook "full of details about how he was going to kill people" to a University of Colorado psychiatrist before the attack, but the parcel sat unopened in a mailroom for as long as a week before its discovery Monday, a law enforcement source told FoxNews.com.

Aurora's mass murderer James Holmes, would appear was working with this program that turns out was linked to a Government contract investigating and mitigating the effects of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder via the Department of Physiology and Biophysics, Neuroscience Graduate Program, University of Colorado at Anshutz Medical Center, Aurora, Colorado. Link to the book Nerve Growth Factors: Advances in Research and Application: 2011 Edition that makes direct referrence to the contract.

As a classic case of national hysteria slowly peaks, still within 24 hours after the massacre of theater-patrons attending a premier of the latest "Batman" thriller in Aurora, Colorado, it's become increasingly difficult to maintain a rational perspective.Apparently without any shame whatsoever, an embattled White House still cannot hesitate to push itself out in front of the trickle of information coming out in the wake of these multiple murders.That as many or more people will die in "random" shootings on the streets of major U.S. cities, Chicago in particular, on an average weekend, this July, still escapes the notice of...

BREAKING: NBC’s Andrea Mitchell: Rep Jesse Jackson Jr is in a rehab facility in AZ suffering from alcoholism and addiction -@JesseRodriguez — HuffPost Politics (@HuffPostPol) July 11, 2012

Dr. Nicholas Cummings June 6, 2012 (LifeSiteNews.com) - A former president of the American Psychological Association (APA), who also introduced the motion to declassify homosexuality as a mental illness in 1975, says that the APA has been taken over by “ultraliberals” beholden to the “gay rights movement,” who refuse to allow an open debate on reparative therapy for homosexuality. Dr. Nicholas Cummings was President of the APA from 1979 to 1980, and also served as a member of the organization’s Council of Representatives. He served for years as Chief of Mental Health with the Kaiser-Permanente Health Maintenance Organization, and is...