The current measles outbreak seems to be occurring not among poor people or destitute people or people who don't have access to healthcare. It appears to be occurring across socioeconomic strata, and particularly in areas of high education and high socioeconomic status.

Andrew Solomon, an LGBTQ activist and Columbia University professor—who also happens to have written a few books, including 2012's Far From the Tree: Parents, Children and the Search for Identity—is now the new president of PEN American Center. A week after being named to the post, we talked to Solomon about free expression, hate speech, and his next book.

Dr. Shervert Frazier's other research through the years focused on areas including headaches and anorexia nervosa, and expanded research of chronic mental illnesses such as schizophrenia.

Dr. Frazier returned to New York to serve as a clinical psychiatry professor and also as deputy director of the New York Psychiatric Institute before moving to McLean in 1972. 

The defense Tuesday called psychiatrist Dr. Michael First to testify about diagnosing Mr. Hernandez with schizotypal personality disorder, an illness related to schizophrenia and characterized by psychosis.

Defense attorneys say Hernandez is mentally ill, concocted the confession under police coercion and suffers hallucinations. He could face life in prison if convicted.
Dr. Michael First, a psychiatrist at [Columbia Psychiatry], testified at Hernandez's trial that he diagnosed the defendant with a schizophrenic personality disorder in 2012, a few months after he was arrested.

The judge said on Tuesday that he had decided to allow prosecutors to cross-examine the psychiatrist, Michael First, on those subjects because they were relevant to his expert diagnosis.

Dr. First testified that Mr. Hernandez has schizotypal personality disorder, an illness related to schizophrenia and characterized by social isolation, difficulty determining reality and bizarre misconceptions, like thinking people on television talk shows are discussing them. “It’s like a milder form of schizophrenia,” Dr. First said.

Co-host Eric Kandel leads an examination of the biological and psychological bases of aggression with psychiatrists Richard Tremblay, Johanna Ray Vollhardt, and Emil Coccaro, biologist David Anderson, and criminologist Adrian Raine.

This the third series of the Charlie Rose Brain Series focuses on brain science and aggression and the social amplification of violence.

In 1862, an American Civil War surgeon noted casualties were suffering from “irritable and exhausted soldier’s hearts.” But, as Jeffrey Lieberman reveals in this excerpt from Shrinks: The Untold Story of Psychiatry, it took more than 100 years, two global conflicts and the brutality of Vietnam before post-traumatic stress disorder was considered a legitimate mental illness.

"It’s an age when problems like depression and general anxiety and other mental health issues may start to emerge in people who are at risk,” according to Jill Harkavy-Friedman, an associate psychiatry professor at Columbia University and vice president of research for the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention.