Robert David Jaffee

A member of the U.S. armed forces commits suicide every 36 hours. A veteran commits suicide every 80 minutes.

There is never any one reason why an individual takes his life. This is as true of civilians as it is of soldiers. Still, in the case of...

The New York Times Magazine recently published a themed issue revolving around brain health. It featured the cover headline, "All in Our Minds." Inside the issue was a piece on anti-depressants by Siddhartha Mukherjee, titled "Post-Prozac Nation." The headlines were misleading. This followed the Times' much more...

Pharaoh had Joseph. Marlon Brando's Don Corleone had Robert Duvall's Tom Hagen in The Godfather. David Cone, Hall of Famer Goose Gossage and numerous baseball stars have Andrew Levy, consigliere to the Boys of Summer as well as athletes in many other professional sports.

Levy, whose New York-based

In the summer of 1985, I attended a game at Yankee Stadium in which Tom Seaver, the former Mets star who was then pitching for the White Sox, beat the Yankees for his 300th career win. But what stood out for me that afternoon was not so much Seaver's impeccable...

Some years ago, I covered a Boston murder trial that involved a defendant who had once been my friend. Dan Mason had been in the Israeli Special Forces, the Israeli equivalent of the Navy SEALs, and had been trained as a sniper. Years after his service in...

When we hear the word "schizophrenic," the first person who usually comes to mind is someone like Jared Loughner, who is suspected in the murder of six people in Tucson a year ago. Yet studies show that schizophrenics and others with severe mental illness are more likely to...

Jared Loughner, the suspect in last year's massacre in Tucson, Ariz., that left 6 dead and 13 wounded, must be forced to take his antipsychotic medication, according to the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals. The court ruled 2-1 that Loughner, who has been diagnosed with schizophrenia and...

Back in January of 1999, when I was becoming psychically unhinged and thought that I would be assassinated and blamed for a series of murders sweeping the nation, I stumbled over to the local police department after midnight one evening. Perhaps, I was seeking a James Dean moment from Rebel...

When a suicidal person seeks help, we try to steer him or her to a safe place, a psychiatrist, a psychiatric ward, and, if need be, an emergency room. When Sean Duvall, a Persian Gulf War veteran, sought help, he ended up being charged with four counts of...

To paraphrase Ronald Reagan, there they go again. The American Psychiatric Association is considering adding grief as yet another diagnosis to the more than 300 that already exist in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.

In recent times, we have seen numerous diagnoses du jour added to...

Mental illness is a killer. It takes the life of a person every 15 minutes in this country. And suicide is the fourth highest cause of death among those between the ages of 18 and 65, according to the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention. Moreover, the...

"When I looked for light, then came darkness." So said President Obama, citing the Book of Job, a year ago, following the Tucson massacre in which Jared Loughner allegedly killed six people and wounded 13 others, including Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords. As I have stated before, the word...

It would seem counter-intuitive, even antithetical, to link mental illness to Darwin's idea of the survival of the fittest. After all, many people assume that the mentally ill are either violent criminals or spiritually weak individuals, prone to the margins of society.

Yet, as I have pointed out since my...

"The willingness with which our young people are likely to serve in any war, no matter how justified, shall be directly proportional to how they perceive the Veterans of earlier wars were treated and appreciated by their nation." That quote from George Washington concludes a new study by...

About 10 years ago, I gave a talk at the Long Beach office of Project Returns, a self-help group run by and for the mentally ill in Los Angeles County. After I finished my prepared remarks, I opened up the discussion to questions, at which point an attendee shot up...

After last week's shooting in Seal Beach, California, in which Scott Dekraai allegedly killed eight people and wounded another at a hair salon, I hearkened back to something a wise psychiatrist once told me: "Premeditated psychosis is a contradiction in terms."

Those in the midst of psychosis or...

Just when the controversy surrounding President Obama's religious background had abated, there he goes again, unleashing his inner Jew.

The president's namesake, Barak (spelled without a C in the King James Bible), was an Israelite captain in the era of the judges. While the name Barak means lightning in Hebrew,...

The Tea Party wreaked havoc with the debt ceiling negotiations, President Obama and the Democrats caved in, the S&P downgraded the U.S. credit rating and the stock market, which had already been tanking, plummeted.

As Sholem Aleichem, the Yiddish sage, once wrote, "Now on to more cheerful things. Tell me,...

Unless one is a discerning fan, one can lose track of some athletes on the playing field. Football players can get lost in a jumble of helmets, while basketball and hockey players can sometimes be hard to differentiate in a swarm to the net. But baseball players, because of their...

President Obama has said that his position on gay marriage is "evolving." Apparently, the same is true of his position on condolence letters to the families of troops who have committed suicide.

Obama announced on July 6 that the White House will start sending such condolence letters, but only...