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Brosh's site, which revolves around personal stories "told very dramatically (hyperbolically, even)" from her real life, has 339,000 Facebook fans and has been considered among one of the funniest sites on the Internet. In 2011, Brosh signed a book deal with Touchstone, a division of Simon & Schuster, based on the blog.

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The counterintuitive findings by researchers at Harvard and MIT, from an experiment involving low-income, able-bodied Oregonians, appear in Thursday's New England Journal of Medicine. The study offers a twist for states weighing a major Medicaid expansion under President Barack Obama's health care law, to serve a similar population of adults around the country.

"The study did not generate any evidence that Medicaid coverage translated to measurable improvements in physical health outcomes over a two-year window," said lead researcher Katherine Baicker of the Harvard School of Public Health. "It did generate robust improvements in mental health and enormous reductions in financial strain and hardship."

That leaves policymakers with "a much more nuanced and complex picture" of the potential benefits of expanding Medicaid, said Baicker, an economist.

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But it’s not just champagne that’s lifting our spirits and banishing the wintertime blues. According to Google (and a team of researchers from the University of Southern California, Harvard and Johns Hopkins) mental illnesses — such as obsessive compulsive disorder, depression and anorexia — are far more seasonal than we think.

The epidemiologists, led by John Ayers, combed through every Google search performed in the United States and Australia between 2006 and 2010, looking for queries like “symptoms of” and “medications for” OCD, anxiety, ADHD, bipolar, depression, anorexia, bulimia and schizophrenia.

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"Adam would come home with bruises all over his body," the relative told the Daily News. "His mom would ask him what was wrong, and he wouldn't say anything. He would just sit there."

The family member went on to say that Lanza's mother was distressed by the abuse, and didn't believe school officials were protecting her son: "Nancy felt fiercely protective of him. She was convinced the school wasn't doing enough to protect Adam. It made her irate."

The relative also appears to attribute Lanza's emotional and mental health problems to the experience, telling the Daily News that he never "seemed right" after his time in Sandy Hook.

“He was a sick boy,” the relative said.

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This may be the right strategy — if you have a shot at the papacy. But if you are trying to secure a spot in the American business world, new research suggests that priming your powerful side is the way to go. A sense of power, it seems, increases your appeal both on paper and in person to those making hiring decisions.

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Under the proposed legislation, a therapist would have to prove that the “goals, outcomes or behaviors" of the client "conflict with a sincerely held religious belief" to refuse them counseling.

As reported by the Tennessean, the measure was "inspired" by the case of a Christian student in Michigan who was expelled from her graduate program after refusing to counsel gay clients and clients who had premarital sex. Julea Ward then sued Eastern Michigan University for expelling her and received a $75,000 settlement. (Who knew being a bigot could help you pay down some of that student debt?)

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Peterson's mother, Harriet McNeill, told the New York Daily News that her attorney would file initial paperwork later this week to hold the city accountable for the broken collarbone her daughter suffered in the fall. “I’ve been telling the school that one of these kids is going to kill my daughter -- and on Friday it almost came true,” she said.

Education officials said that they are putting the boy who attacked Peterson on another route. Both students attend the Brooklyn Children's Center, a private school for students with emotional, behavioral and other health problems.

According to McNeill's attorney, the boy involved in the incident has a history of violent behavior. In addition to the driver, there was a bus monitor present during the incident. Neither face disciplinary action, according to city officials.

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He was staying with our parents in the New York suburbs. On his laptop, he read the New York Times and flipped through our sister’s vacation photos. He corresponded with a mentor and asked potential landlords about on-street parking during his upcoming residency. On Wikipedia, he read about Baal Shem Tov, an 18th century Jewish mystic who our father says is our ancestor, and the pop-punk band Rancid, which rocked his adolescence. He searched for suicide notes and sites on famous last words and asked Google, “How many times does a human heart beat in a life?”

Anthony had a longtime fixation on losing his hair. In chat rooms he visited, balding men vented and swapped treatment tips. Anthony researched the effects of antidepressants and antidepressant withdrawal on hair loss. He read pages on Prince William – did balding “hasten his engagement?”—and a site called Baldcelebrity.com. Anthony was not noticeably balding.

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This was the opening sentence of a journal entry I wrote in my second grade Language Arts class, responding to the question, “What do you want to be when you grow up?”

Each day of the school week, we were supposed to write in our journals, a minimum of a page, either in response to assigned prompts from our teacher, Mrs. McKierney, or through free writing at the start of class. We were encouraged to share our feelings and to say what was on our minds. The goal of the journals was to promote the act of writing, but my chief pastime as an 8-year-old boy was playing Nintendo, which didn’t require much capacity for language beyond dull grunts, hollers and the occasional curse word said under my breath when my mother was home or screamed when she wasn’t.

I had only written a few entries on the night before they were due for Mrs. McKierney’s monthly checkup. Watching TV in my bedroom, which is how I always did my homework, I wrote more than 20 of them, penning response after response to prompts such as “What will you do over spring break?” and “Write about your favorite hobby and why you love it.” My mother promised me a Nintendo game if I received an A, so I was motivated, even though anything school-related was worse than eating vegetables, something I often refused to do without bribery, too.

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This is why the last year has been so important for the 40 million Americans like me who the National Institute of Mental Health says periodically suffer from anxiety-related disorders. It was a year that saw these all-too-common ailments emerge from the shadows.

It started in professional sports, a particularly difficult arena for a mental-health coming out party. After all, it's a machismo-dominated world where showing any signs of weakness is usually depicted as nothing more than a personal failing or a lack of "toughness."

Yet, last April, San Francisco Giants first baseman Aubrey Huff put himself on the disabled list for an anxiety disorder and courageously opened up to that city's newspaper about his struggles. Then came what the New York Times called "one of the more frightening — and remarkable — rounds of golf ever caught on video" -- the one in which Charlie Beljan competed in (and eventually won) a PGA tournament while experiencing a five-hour panic attack. His attack was so severe, in fact, that upon finishing a golf round, he had to be carted away in an ambulance.

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As reported by the Columbia Spectator:

According to the complaint, Ungerleider became angry after Spanish professor Ruth Borgman gave him an unfairly low grade on a final project and called her a bitch in front of his class during the final exam. He emailed Senior Associate Dean of Academic Affairs Hazel May to say he was sorry and explain that he was being unfairly graded, but she told him to see a psychologist, it says.

The complaint says that May directed Stephanie Nixon, then the director of residential programs, to visit Ungerleider’s Wien dorm room. She did so at 12:30 in the morning, accompanied by campus security officers, who unlocked the door. When Ungerleider resisted, Nixon called the New York Police Department, and three officers handcuffed Ungerleider and escorted him to the hospital... Malekshahi and other doctors medicated him against his will and kept him in containment, it says.

Ungerleider eventually requested a court date to challenge his hospitalization, but the appearance did not result in his release. Instead, he remained at St. Luke’s until doctors released him on Jan. 21, 2011, the complaint says.

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"This is a scourge on society," Gov. Andrew Cuomo said Monday night, six days after making gun control a centerpiece of his progressive agenda in his State of the State address. The bipartisan effort was fueled by the Newton tragedy that took the lives of 20 first graders and six educators. "At what point do you say, 'No more innocent loss of life.'"

Sen. Jeffrey Klein, leader of the Independent Democratic Conference in the Senate, said it is landmark legislation. "This is not about taking anyone's rights away," said Klein, a Bronx Democrat. "It's about a safe society ... today we are setting the mark for the rest of the county to do what's right."

The measure, which calls for a tougher assault weapons ban and restrictions on ammunition and the sale of guns, passed the Senate 43-18 on the strength of support from Democrats, many of whom previously sponsored bills that were once blocked by Republicans. The Democrat-led Assembly gaveled out before midnight and planned to take the issue up at 10 a.m. Tuesday. It is expected to pass easily.

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Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation (or TMS), involves wearing a helmet filled with electromagnetic coils that sends magnetic pulses to "rewire" specific neural pathways in the brain. Brainsway, a publicly traded Israeli company, has an exclusive license for the technology.

While TMS bears some resemblance to electroconvulsive therapy, doctors say it works quite differently. Traditional shock therapy induces seizures to release neurotransmitters, the goal for TMS is to energize nerve tracks in the brain by making them fire more frequently. The magnetic field impulses of TMS are far gentler, the same strength as those used in magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) machines.

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"Let's be serious" Charles Krauthammer, pundit and former practicing psychiatrist, wrote recently in the Washington Post:

Monsters shall always be with us, but in earlier days they did not roam free. As a psychiatrist in Massachusetts in the 1970s, I committed people — often right out of the emergency room — as a danger to themselves or to others. I never did so lightly, but I labored under none of the crushing bureaucratic and legal constraints that make involuntary commitment infinitely more difficult today.

Why do you think we have so many homeless? Destitution? Poverty has declined since the 1950s. The majority of those sleeping on grates are mentally ill. In the name of civil liberties, we let them die with their rights on.

A tiny percentage of the mentally ill become mass killers. Just about everyone around Tucson shooter Jared Loughner sensed he was mentally ill and dangerous. But in effect, he had to kill before he could be put away — and (forcibly) treated.

Random mass killings were three times more common in the 2000s than in the 1980s, when gun laws were actually weaker. Yet a 2011 University of California at Berkeley study found that states with strong civil-commitment laws have about a one-third lower homicide rate.

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“I live with a son who is mentally ill. I love my son. But he terrifies me," wrote Liza Long.

Long described a number of frightening incidents involving her 13-year-old son, "Michael" (a pseudonym) -- a child with a soaring IQ who has threatened his mother with knives so many times that she carries around a Tupperware container for the days she has to collect and hide all the sharp objects in the house. Long's other two children, she wrote, know to follow a safety drill to lock themselves in the car during Michael's fits of rage.

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From Bloomberg:

The bill, which passed 398-1, would amend a section of the U.S. Code that defines the meanings of certain words used in acts of Congress. Making the change would eliminate “references that contribute to the stigmatization of mental health conditions,” according to an April 25 statement by the bill’s sponsor, Democratic Senator Kent Conrad of North Dakota.

“The term ‘lunatic’ holds a place in antiquity and should no longer have a prominent place in our U.S. code,” Representative Bobby Scott, a Virginia Democrat who serves on the House Judiciary Committee, said today on the floor.

Gohmert, who serves on the House Judiciary Committee, told Bloomberg in an email: “Not only should we not eliminate the word ‘lunatic’ from federal law when the most pressing issue of the day is saving our country from bankruptcy, we should use the word to describe the people who want to continue with business as usual in Washington."

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