Dr. Harold Koplewicz

This is it: National Children's Mental Health Awareness Week is this week (May 6-12), and we want to make as big a noise as we can, letting as many people as possible know that we think kids' mental health is as important as their physical health. I hope you'll join...

Psychotropic medications are no stranger to controversy, but lately there has been a surge in attacks on their efficacy. The latest comes from Irving Kirsch, Ph.D., of the Placebo Studies Program at Harvard Medical School, who shared his highly-debatable theory that antidepressant medications are no more effective than placebos on...

"Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close" isn't exactly a favorite to win the Academy Award for Best Picture, but it's my personal favorite for a film that shows not only the courage of children but the courage of parents.

In the movie, based on the Jonathan Safran Foer novel, an...

On Sunday, Jan. 29th, the New York Times fired a shot across the bow of every parent of a child who's taking stimulant medications for ADHD. A piece in the Times' Sunday Review section claimed that there is no evidence that medication helps kids with ADHD after an...

You will not be surprised to hear that Walter Isaacson's biography of the hugely admired and widely mourned Steve Jobs is a runaway bestseller, breaking this year's record by selling 379,000 copies its first week out. But you might be surprised to hear that it didn't match the record set...

New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg recently announced an ambitious project to help the more than a quarter million young black and Latino men in our city who seem to be slipping into a kind of dysfunctional parallel universe: failing in school, finding no jobs, and landing, in appalling numbers,...

Among the balloons that exploded during this super-heated summer was the intensifying debate over the worth of psychotropic medications.

Marcia Angell, the distinguished ex-editor of the New England Journal of Medicine, kicked things off with a ferocious two-part attack in The New York Review of Books on antidepressants,...

The anniversary of 9/11 is always a painful one: It reminds us of the events of that terrible day, of the thousands of lives lost, of how stunned and vulnerable we felt as the reality of the attacks sank in.

But there's also the desire to honor the dead, the...

It's a remarkable and riveting story -- a teenager spirals, inexplicably, into severe emotional distress that leads her to attack herself brutally by slashing and burning her body. Confined to a locked "safe room" at a psychiatric hospital, she uses the only weapon available to keep hurting herself, banging her...

Baby Storm is four months old; it lives in Toronto, Canada, and is as cute as can be. Wait -- "it"?

That's right. Storm's parents are keeping the infant's sex a secret from everyone but the immediate family and a handful of confidants in an effort to provide the child...

When Trudie Styler -- the multi-talented actor, filmmaker, eco-activist, UNICEF ambassador, mother of four and Sting's partner for 29 years -- first started school in the English Midlands, she had trouble learning to read. School officials sent her to get her eyes tested. When it turned out that the problem...

I like to think that we are making great progress in the fight against the stigma of mental illness -- a fight that is necessary to ensure that people of any age with psychiatric or learning disorders feel comfortable getting the care they need. Once-taboo issues like depression, bipolar disorder,...

Most of the worry swirling around kids and social media these days involves bullying -- kids doing hurtful things to other kids on sites like Facebook. But on YouTube the most disturbing phenomenon is kids doing hurtful things to themselves, and sharing the videos.

A study last month in...

Parents have always struggled with how to talk with their kids about sex, but in a world where pornography is a mouse click away, the conversation is more complicated than ever. A rather alarming number of adolescents -- girls as well as boys -- seem to be looking at porn...

A child with life-threatening illness can galvanize a family, even a whole community, to pull together to help her get the best care possible. But when children have psychiatric disorders, the effect is often, sadly, different.

Children with mental illnesses can put great strain on their parents, especially when...

Courage is a standard theme in popular movie making, from "Saving Private Ryan" to the remake of "True Grit." But "The King's Speech," the charmingly modest film that's captured 12 Oscar nominations this year, explores an entirely different kind of courage than the quality that's on display in battle or...

It's been called "the most dangerous program that has ever been foisted on your children!" That's a characteristic bit of overstatement from the conservative media watchdog Parents Television Council, but plenty of people are worrying and wondering if the new MTV series "Skins" is seriously bad for kids.

The other day I took a stroll through the Young Adult Literature section of my local Barnes & Noble. I picked up bestsellers like Jay Asher's "Thirteen Reasons Why," narrated by a high school junior who kills herself, after sending audiotapes to the 13 people she blames, and Suzanne Collins'...

In the mass shooting in Arizona Saturday there were heroes who prevented even more bloodshed. We need heroes to intervene before lives are lost.

The three people who wrestled Jared Loughner to the ground and disarmed him outside a supermarket in Tucson are being hailed as heroes,...

Parents who keep an eye on YouTube are likely aware of a recent viral video: The young actress and singer Miley Cyrus smoking an unknown substance leading to a fit of laughter and apparently extreme disorientation -- even hallucination. Some watchers have concluded that Cyrus' bong was likely...