At the end of the Charles Bronson film, 10 to Midnight, a serial killer, who has just been apprehended, reverts to a variation of the same plea uttered by Andy Robinson's psychopath in Dirty Harry and Leo Gorcey's punk in Dead End: "society made me do it."

Like Clint Eastwood...

After the Fort Hood shooting, which as of press time had left 13 dead and scores wounded, there were reports first that the alleged shooter, Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, was dead, and then that he was not talking.

We would learn later that Hasan was in a coma, but upon...

How many times have we read about mental illness in connection with the Virginia Tech massacre, when Seung-hui Cho murdered 32 people on campus, before taking his own life?

A recent example occurred in the L.A. Times, in its story headlined "UCLA stabbing puts renewed focus on mental health."...

The expression, "I had a bad childhood," has never seemed sufficient for describing the horrors visited upon many youth. The expression's inadequacy becomes apparent when one hears the story of Jani Schofield, a seven-year-old, who has been diagnosed with schizophrenia and has already been hospitalized seven or eight times in...

Too often when we read stories about the mentally ill, we read about tragedy. A typical example is that of Michael Laudor, a Yale Law School student, who was touted by no less than the New York Times as a highly functional psychotic. Alternately diagnosed as a schizophrenic and schizo-affective,...

How many times have I been fired? What would I do if my wife left me? How could someone have helped me ten years ago, during my second psychotic break, when I trampled for six hours across Los Angeles, convinced that I was going to be assassinated?

Ranging from the...

If the stigma attached to mental illness is going to end any time soon, it will be because of people like Sharon Dunas, president of the National Alliance on Mental Illness for the Westside of Los Angeles. Dunas, who is a marriage & family therapist with a private practice, devotes...

After receiving some thoughtful comments from people suffering from manic-depression, I would like to follow up on my last post ("Lies and Lying Liars Hurt the Mentally Ill"). In that previous piece, I wrote about how serial criminals like mass murderer Brian Nichols and rapist/hostage taker Leeland Eisenberg damage...

As much as TV pundits damage the cause of the mentally ill by often ascribing mass murders to "psychotics," as opposed to psychopaths, they are not alone in perpetuating stigma. Some of the worst offenders are charlatans who claim to be mentally ill after they have committed an atrocious crime...

In recent days, a story spread that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had referred to White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel and Obama adviser David Axelrod as "self-hating Jews." Asked about this by Wolf Blitzer on CNN, Netanyahu denied the allegations. But the rumor offered a glimpse into the...

A friend of mine from graduate school raised some interesting points regarding one of my previous pieces, titled "Psychopaths, Not Psychotics" (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/robert-david-jaffee/psychopaths-not-psychotic_b_278393.html). In that post, I cited two studies, one from the National Institute of Mental Health and the other from the Department of Justice, indicating that the mentally ill,...

In the wake of Congressman Joe Wilson's recent "You lie!" flare-up, which interrupted President Barack Obama's speech before the Congress, Maureen Dowd of The New York Times and Tim Rutten of the L.A. Times wrote thoughtfully about the ignoble history of South Carolina on matters of race.

Wilson's outburst culminated...

Just hours after the AP reported that the number of Japanese centenarians has doubled in the past six years, Gertrude Baines of Los Angeles, the oldest person in the world at 115, passed away.

Ms. Baines claimed that the secret to her long life was no drinking, no smoking and...

In a year of mass killings, Guy Heinze, Jr., who dialed 911 to report the slaying of seven family members and a friend on August 29, was charged on September 4 with eight counts of first-degree murder in Brunswick, Ga.

Though nothing good can come out of this tragedy, we...

The recent induction of Rickey Henderson into the National Baseball Hall of Fame coincided with rumors that Commissioner Bud Selig might be considering reinstating Pete Rose, who was banished 20 years ago by then-Commissioner Bart Giamatti for betting on baseball.

Giamatti had compared baseball to an epic poem, and that...

The heat, which topped 100 degrees earlier in the day, has subsided on this May evening as we go on our massa, or night patrol, through trails of the Negev Desert, on the outskirts of Bahalatz, a base for the Israeli Army's combat engineers.

Carrying unloaded M-16s, we march in...