In the News

Walking through the woods alone can be a scary prospect for a kid, but not for 7-year-old Matthew of Portland, Oregon. He doesn't have much of a backyard at his condo, so the woods behind his house essentially serve the same purpose. He spends hours out there: swinging on a tire swing, tromping across the ravine to a friend's house, and using garden shears to cut a path. He lays down sticks to form a bridge across the small stream that flows in the winter.

And he does all of this without any adult supervision.

On a March morning in 1989, Robert Shoots was found dead in his garage in Weir, Kan. He had run a tube from the tailpipe of his beloved old Chrysler to the front seat, where he sat with a bottle of Wild Turkey. He was 80.

His daughter wishes he had mentioned this plan when they spoke by phone the night before, because she didn't get to say a satisfying goodbye. But she would not have tried to dissuade him from suicide.

The number of children diagnosed with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder(ADHD) has reached more than 10 percent, a significant increase during the past 20 years, according to a study released Friday.

The rise was most pronounced in minority groups, suggesting that better access to health insurance and mental health treatment through the Affordable Care Act might have played some role in the increase. The rate of diagnosis during that time period doubled in girls, although it was still much lower than in boys.

Diabetes is a well-known health threat in the U.S., with rates that have reached epidemic levels in recent years. But now researchers are reporting that another scourge has surpassed it in terms of deadliness: suicides and deaths from drug overdoses.

At a time when the U.S. government is trying to deal with a nationwide opioid epidemic, many jails across the country are only now rolling out medicines to help inmates overcome addiction. And most of those jails dispense only one of the drugs currently available.

Nearly 1 in 5 jail and prison inmates regularly used heroin or opioids before being incarcerated, making jails a logical entry point for intervention, according to the U.S. Department of Justice.

When Dorothy Paugh was 9, her father bought a pistol and started talking openly about ending his life. Her mother was terrified, but didn't know what to do.

"She called our priest and called his best friend," Paugh recalled. "They came and talked to him and they didn't ask to take his gun away."

Her father was 51 when he shot himself to death.

The long, discouraging quest for a medication that works to treat Alzheimer's reached a potentially promising milestone on Wednesday. For the first time in a large clinical trial, a drug was able to both reduce the plaques in the brains of patients and slow the progression of dementia.

Greg Sturgill had been working as a nurse in Central Appalachia for 15 years when he was diagnosed with bipolar II disorder in 2006.

Sturgill was treated and hospitalized more than once while doctors attempted to balance his medication against pre-existing heart problems. He was startled to learn that his father had also suffered from mental illness and even received electroshock therapy, but had hidden his condition from his children.