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"In fact, he says, schizophrenia did not rise in prevalence until the latter half of the 18th century, when for the first time people in Paris and London started keeping cats as pets. The so-called cat craze began among “poets and left-wing avant-garde Greenwich Village types,” says Torrey, but the trend spread rapidly—and coinciding with that development, the incidence of schizophrenia soared. " *** “If I had to guess,” says Torrey, “I’d say 75 percent of cases of schizophrenia are associated with infectious agents, and Toxo would be involved in a significant subset of those.” *** "Closer inspection of Flegr’s...

Jaroslav Flegr is no kook. And yet, for years, he suspected his mind had been taken over by parasites that had invaded his brain. So the prolific biologist took his science-fiction hunch into the lab. What he’s now discovering will startle you. Could tiny organisms carried by house cats be creeping into our brains, causing everything from car wrecks to schizophrenia? A biologist’s science- fiction hunch is gaining credence and shaping the emerging science of mind- controlling parasites.

Fullerton's acting police chief acknowledged Thursday that the department had allowed police officers involved in a deadly encounter with a homeless man to watch a video that captures the incident before writing their reports about it. Acting Chief Kevin Hamilton said supervisors allowed the review so that the officers would have a chance to refresh their memory and write an accurate account of the incident involving Kelly Thomas. But the practice is at odds with the way many other police departments deal with serious use-of-force cases. The LAPD's former inspector general, Jeffrey Eglash, said that allowing police to look at...

Government Senator Marc Bean recently called for a debate on the merits of decriminalising drugs in the wake of a report from the Global Commission on Drug Policy. A distinguished panel that wrote the report said the war on drugs had failed and recommended partial legalization as a solution to the blight of the illegal drugs trade on communities around the world. Not so fast, warn medics. Side effects of marijuana can include a heightened risk of psychotic illnesses like schizophrenia, depression, damage to memory and judgement and heart problems. Neurologist Dr Keith Chiappa said: “The use of marijuana, especially...

Epidemiologists showed decades ago that people raised in cities are more prone to mental disorders than those raised in the countryside. But neuroscientists have avoided studying the connection, preferring to leave the disorderly realm of the social environment to social scientists. A paper in this issue of Nature represents a pioneering foray across that divide. Using functional brain imaging, a group led by Andreas Meyer-Lindenberg of the University of Heidelberg's Central Institute of Mental Health in Mannheim, Germany, showed that specific brain structures in people from the city and the countryside respond differently to social stress (see pages 452 and...

BOSTON — Last November, Yvette Chappell found herself increasingly anxious that her 27-year-old son, Deshawn James Chappell, was spiraling downward into deep psychosis. He was exhibiting intense paranoia and calling late at night to complain about deafening voices in his head.

[A brief introduction. This article, published in Maclean's, was the first popular treatment of LSD. Those who associate LSD with the 1960s will be surprised at the way the drug was categorized and presented in the early 1950s. At the time, people thought LSD induced a temporary psychosis: synthetic schizophrenia. Some psychiatrists were recommending other psychiatrists take the drug so as to get an "inside-out" experience of schizophrenia. I've put the beignning and the end just below, while snipping Katz's blow-by-blow depiction of his experience itself: it can be found in the original article, starting on page two.] Here is...

....But the most talked-about speech at this year’s meeting, which ended Jan. 30, involved a new “outgroup.”... It was identified by Jonathan Haidt, a social psychologist at the University of Virginia who studies the intuitive foundations of morality and ideology. He polled his audience at the San Antonio Convention Center, starting by asking how many considered themselves politically liberal. A sea of hands appeared, and Dr. Haidt estimated that liberals made up 80 percent of the 1,000 psychologists in the ballroom. When he asked for centrists and libertarians, he spotted fewer than three dozen hands. And then, when he asked...

The only competent analysis of the Tucson murderer I am aware of was done by Charles Krauthammer. In addition to being a Pulitzer Prize recipient for commentary, he is also a board-certified psychiatrist who was chief resident at the Massachusetts General Hospital. He states that the murderer is clearly a paranoid schizophrenic, with typical delusions of mind control by the government. Dr. Krauthammer went on to note that the murderer lived in his own self-created world and was not motivated by politics. To this I would add only that throughout history, psychotic individuals modified their delusions and hallucinations to suit...

Like most of you, I have been defending Sarah Palin against baseless accusations since the shootings a week ago in Tucson. I have struggled to come to grips with how this guy could reach the point that he would commit such a horrific act, and how people that I considered to be friends could defend those who were so quick to attribute blame to Sarah for what the guy did. In the course of offering up a defense on my Facebook page, where I have almost 700 friends, I made this posting on Wednesday evening: If you want to see...

In his Tucson speech, Presi dent Obama rightly said that "terrible things happen for reasons that defy human understanding." Why that morning? Why Gabby Giffords? These and other questions can't be answered, but at a more pedestrian level, the massacre isn't so mysterious: Someone displaying all the symptoms of untreated schizophrenia killed people. This is not an extraordinarily rare or inexplicable occurrence. According to the psychiatrist E. Fuller Torrey, 4 million people in the United States have serious mental illnesses, and 1.8 million of them go untreated. Two hundred thousand are homeless, and 300,000 are in jail or prison. Tormented...

Fox News was able to interview a former girlfriend of Jared Loughner, the man awaiting trial for the weekend’s shooting outside a Tuscon, Arizona Safeway which left six people dead and Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords with a gunshot wound to the head. She shed some light on the background of one of the most talked about men in the country, and offered some information that seemed to be at odds with other things we’re learning and speculating about the 22-year-old shooter. Ashley Figueroa spoke briefly about Loughner’s (Former? Current? Is it even a factor in his crime?) drug use, sharing that...

"I know how to cut a body open and eat you for more then a week. ;-)" "Does anyone have aggression 24/7?" "Being alone for a very long time will inevitably lead you to rape." These postings to an online gaming forum, and others like them, shed further light on the troubled mental state of Jared Loughner, the suspect in Saturday's deadly Tucson shootings.

Did our angry political culture help motivate Jared Lee Loughner on what authorities say was his mad shooting spree? Maybe, but a more troubling question for me is why nobody stopped this often incoherent, irrational young man on his long path to the rampage in Tucson. I don't just mean the people who sold Loughner his Glock 19 semiautomatic pistol last November, or the people at a Wal-Mart who allegedly sold him ammunition a few hours before the assault. I mean the community in which he lived. This was a young man who showed signs of mental illness, yet in...

It wasn't long after news of the Tucson, Ariz., tragedy broke that the words "paranoid schizophrenic" entered the conversation. Armchair psychiatrists across the country looked at Jared Loughner -- 22, history of antisocial behavior, with a cache of rambling YouTube videos on government mind control -- and diagnosed him. But is there any truth to this? And if so, how does it help make sense of his horrific actions? To try and untangle the influences that might lead one lone gunman to fire his Glock at a political rally, we turned to Dr. E. Fuller Torrey, respected psychiatrist and one...

Why Wasn't Loughner's Mental Health Evaluated?Despite many red flags, he was never evaluated Updated: Tuesday, 11 Jan 2011, 6:50 PM MST TUCSON - As the legal case against Jared Loughner makes its way through the court system, the question is: could anything have been done to prevent the attack? Does anyone bear responsibility for failing to stop him? Pima Community College asked Jared Loughner to leave and not come back until his parents could show he was getting help with his mental health needs. That did not happen. An expert on mental health law in Arizona wishes the school had...

One or two commentators got it right, characterizing the shootings in Arizona of a congresswoman, judge, and four other bystanders -- including a 79-year-old woman and a nine-year-old girl, who attended the fateful event due to her interest in government and politics -- as an act committed by a deranged gunman. But the spin is on by the usual MSM suspects that the shootings were due to "hostility" and "polarization" caused by (guess who?) right-wingers who have ratcheted up the rhetoric about health care and immigration. Even the sheriff on the scene went to great lengths to politicize the tragedy,...

A neighbor says the parents of the suspect in Saturday's shooting spree in Tucson are devastated and guilt-ridden. Jared Loughnerappeared in court Monday on federal charges that he tried to assassinate U.S. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords and killed a federal judge. He is also accused of killing five others and wounding or injuring 13 others. Wayne Smith, who lives across the street from the family, said Randy and Amy Loughner blame themselves.

Reporting from Tucson — The parents of Jared Lee Loughner, accused of shooting Arizona Rep. Gabrielle Giffords and 19 other people, were huddled in seclusion in their Tucson home Monday night, his father crying and his mother so shaken she could not get out of bed, a neighbor told The Times. As the sun was beginning to set Monday, Randy Loughner called his neighbor, retired gasoline truck driver Wayne Smith, 70, to ask him to get their mail. Smith, who is not particularly close to the Loughners, grabbed the mail and was invited inside. "They're in there now," Smith said...

The news that Blue-Dog Democrat Gabrielle Giffords was shot in the head by a deeply disturbed young man was certainly enough to shock. Add to that the death of a Republican-appointed chief judge. Further add the heart-rending death of a nine-year-old girl who was born on September 11th, 2001. Four others died along with those two. Eleven others were wounded along with Rep. Giffords. The young man who killed and wounded them is all-but certainly a schizophrenic. He's of the age when male schizophrenics first undergo a break from reality. In Jared Lee Loughner's case, his break was both psychotic...