Mental Illness

As ER waits stretch for days, Mass. turns to in-home care for children's mental health
Thirty-seven hospitals in Massachusetts have started offering intensive home-based mental health care to the families of children stuck in emergency rooms. Counseling at home instead of admission to a psychiatric...

Parkland, Newtown Community Suicides Prompt Dialogue On Trauma Support
Deaths by suicide by Parkland and Newtown survivors are sparking a conversation about how to support people long-term after violent trauma. We’re listening.

I Know The Devastation Suicide Leaves Behind. I Wish I Didn’t
Like Anthony Bourdain and Kate Spade, my husband died by suicide, leaving our daughters and loving family struggling, wondering why.

This Is The Problem With Casually Using The Word 'Depressed'
There is a vast difference between being sad and suffering from the mental illness that I and millions of others live with, writes Jane Roper.

How To Talk To Your College-Age Kids About Depression And Suicide
Parents, have your elevator speech ready, writes Nancy Rappaport.
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On 'S-Town' And Suicide: Could Anyone Have Saved John B. McLemore?
One of the implicit messages in the popular podcast is that John's suicide was inevitable, writes Karen Seif. But it is possible that mental health intervention could have saved his...

Conflicting Stories Of Police Killing Of Man In South End
An update on the developing investigation into the the police shooting of Terrence Coleman.

Over The Line: Halloween Fun At The Expense Of The Mentally Ill
We would be rightly horrified by a Halloween party with a concentration camp theme, or a slave ship theme, writes Rae Simpson, so how can it be okay to mock...

Judy Collins On Suicide, Mental Illness And The Story Her Voice Is Telling
Singer Judy Collins wins an award from McLean Hospital for speaking out about mental health and addiction, including her own alcoholism and depression and her son's 1992 suicide.

Study: Despite Weight Gain, Quitting Smoking Improves Heart Health For Mentally Ill After A Year
That's the good news part of the research. The bad news is that if they continue to gain weight, they may lose ground and still end up with heart disease...

Commentary: Getting Off Psych Meds Was The 'Hardest Thing' She'd Ever Done
"Every patient is unique, and there is still so much we don’t know," writes Dr. Annie Brewster, after relaying a woman's story navigating the mental health system.

Landmark Gene Discovery Cracks Open 'Black Box' Of Schizophrenia
Researchers based at the Broad Institute in Cambridge have pinpointed the gene that is the biggest risk factor for schizophrenia discovered so far, and figured out how it does its...

Ted Stanley, Who Donated Hundreds Of Millions For Mental Illness Research, Dies
Stanley's 2014 donation of $650 million to the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard was billed as "the largest ever donation toward psychiatric research."
How Trauma Brings Fear, Yes, But Also More Nuanced Reactions
Adaptations such as resilience, the ability to “bounce back” after stressful life events, and post-traumatic growth, the range of positive psychological changes that occur following trauma, have both been shown...

Is It Possible To Prevent Suicide? 2 Psychiatrists Map Out The Ways
We don’t treat suicide itself. We treat the causes of suicide.

Stressed-Out Undergrads And The College Mental Health Crisis
The bottom line: undergrads are struggling, many of them suffering from mild, moderate and severe mental illness. And colleges are scrambling to figure out ways to cope, from setting up...

Why Don't We Have Mental Health Parity?
Insurance companies are required by law to cover mental health the same as physical health. So why don’t they?

Dr. Mark Vonnegut: On Creativity, Being 'Crazy' And Getting Help
The reason the arts and craziness run in families is because crazy people who can sing and dance and paint pictures and write well do a much better job of...

The Upside Of Admission To The Psych Unit: A Doctor's Inside View
Images from “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” fill people’s imaginations, as do fantasies of the “shock therapy” room, which many incorrectly think is a place of punishment and not...

Predicting The Next Mental Health Crisis: Sometimes We Just Can't Know
For all of modern medicine, predictions are surprisingly fraught with difficulty. Doctors are wrong all the time. That’s a fact.