I asked more than a dozen expert psychiatric colleagues, and myself, the questions they most frequently receive about psychiatric medications from people who take them or their families. Here are a dozen of those many questions; the responses are mine.

I have spent half of my life as a mental health advocate, and it's really refreshing to see how many people understand the need to talk about these issues. However, these problems won't be changed with conversation. They will be changed with action.

Until we open up the conversation about treating mental illness and take away the shame that comes with it, to many suicide will still seem like the only way out of the pain that they are enduring.

Countless mental health professionals care deeply about their patients and want them to get better. Strengthening involuntary treatment will allow them to do that.

Serious mental illnesses can be agony: They are as painful as physical illnesses but further bedeviling because there is no broken bone, no dead heart or lung tissue, no cancer or non-functioning organ to point to.

Unlike cancer or heart disease, psychiatric disorders continue to stand as an enigma to much of the modern world. This often leaves those closest to the patient wondering both how to feel and what to do.

Most children with mental illness respond to standard treatments and interventions and experience relief from their symptoms; for some families, recovery can be a greater challenge.

In the aftermath of the shooting last week on another college campus, I am reminded of a common response to such horrors: to pray and seek solace from...