Today, in my email Inbox, I got the latest issue of Metropolis, a grant-funded online publication that has covered Philadelphia for the past three years. I always look forward to opening the email and heading to the website. There are always, without exception, stories there that I won't...

Whenever there's an episode of public violence, the question that naturally arises is: Why? What would make a person do such a horrible thing? The easiest fallback is to say the person must be mentally ill. In the case of Adam Lanza, we know almost nothing at all about his...

Justin Bieber has released a new Christmas video -- which would normally be a lamentable but inevitable fact of the holiday season. But he has done so in "steampunk" fashion.

If you're not familiar with steampunk, it's a sci-fi genre whose adherents have a fascination with the 19th century, and...

When people describe themselves as "gamers," I have a retrograde image of a young virginal boy at home with his custom Alienware, eating frozen pizza, drinking soda, and talking to his "friends" by headset through Ventrilo while cruising the Earthen Ring on World...

You've seen them -- the lists, tips, tricks, tools telling you how to make your life better. Some are great. They're fun. And sometimes useful. And sometimes, not so much.

They're especially prevalent in the context of mental health newsletters and websites, which is understandable. After all, those of us...

The London Telegraph's Celia Walden had herself done up like Sarah Palin. She writes:

As a former beauty queen, Sarah Palin has a point to make: she's a female Clark Kent wishing to distance herself from the spandex and big hair of her...

Phil Gramm, how you've cheered me. Here I was, feeling sad about my $4-per-gallon gas prices and $20 bunch of bananas and now I hear I have nothing to worry about. Because the recession is actually just "mental"!

You can't imagine what this...

The elderly in nursing homes have long been treated poorly, as so many guilty adult children (cf. The Savages) can attest. But because of societal prejudices and pervasive ageism, little attention has been paid by the mainstream media. Now, however, one of the...

A new study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences says gays and lesbians do, in fact, have biological differences that suggest homosexuality is determined during fetal development. Gay men's brains are configured more like heterosexual women's brains, while lesbians' brain...

Recently Brian Mullen, an engineering student at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, won the school's Technology Innovation Challenge by inventing a new kind of Deep Pressure vest. Autistic children, their parents, and adults with mental illnesses may be inclined to rejoice. Says Mullen, as quoted on ScienceDaily.com:

"People...

In 2007 and 2008, many celebrities have come out of the closet about struggling with mental illness.

Just a brief rundown:

- Delta Burke (serious clinical depression)

- Patrick Dempsey (depression, for about two days)

- Alicia Keys (depression)

- Drew Carey (depression)

- Fall-Out Boy's Pete Wentz (manic-depression -...