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Since its inception, the court-ordered intervention has generated controversy. Proponents say it secures the comprehensive care that people with severe mental illnesses might not recognize they need. Yet other health experts question the effectiveness of the intervention and suggest it represents a quick fix in a mental health system that is not adequately serving patients.

When public health officials get wind of an outbreak of Hepatitis A or influenza, they spring into action with public awareness campaigns, monitoring and outreach. But should they be acting with equal urgency when it comes to childhood trauma?

After steadily declining for more than two decades, deadly shootings are rising across the country, according to a new government report.

The researchers also said that the number of suicides involving a firearm grew 21 percent between 2006 and 2016.

Scientists may have caught a glimpse of what sadness looks like in the brain.

A study of 21 people found that for most, feeling down was associated with greater communication between brain areas involved in emotion and memory, a team from the University of California, San Francisco reported Thursday in the journal Cell.

Media reports of suicides of high-profile individuals make it easy to believe that suicide is a leading killer of people with serious mental illness. It's not even close, falling behind largely preventable conditions such as heart disease (10 times higher than suicide), cancer, diabetes, and other chronic diseases.

Although these diseases can affect anyone, they make for a particularly lethal combination among people with serious mental illness. In fact, people with serious mental illness die 10 to 25 years earlier than the general population.

Suicides by young people in Japan rose to their highest level in three decades in 2017, according to new figures released by the government.

Japan has a persistent problem with suicides, although the number has been declining over all. But child suicides have risen recently, with experts pointing to school pressures and bullying as likely triggers.

The woman sitting in a Chino prison cell had screaming fits every 15 minutes for four hours before she finally lay on the floor and ripped out her own eye.

Guards rushed in amid blaring alarms, but they were too late. She had swallowed it.

My grandmother, Bella, a former nurse in the Ukraine, moved to the United States to help raise me when I was 7 months old. She was diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease last year.

There was nothing to do to prevent her inexorable loss of memory and independence, her Massachusetts General Hospital memory specialist told our family, except to take a drug called memantine that slightly improves cognition in Alzheimer's patients, but does not treat the underlying disease.