Hot MedFax

This may shock you (as it did me).  But most crimes are not committed by mentally ill people. According to a new study   of crimes committed by people with serious mental disorders, only 7.5 percent were directly related to symptoms of mental illness, newswise.com reports. Of course, it's the horrific crimes that are perpetrated by the mentally ill that we hear about, I suppose. But r esearchers who analyzed 429 crimes committed by 143 offenders with three major types of mental illness found that 3 percent of their crimes were directly related to symptoms of major depression, 4 percent to symptoms of schizophrenia disorders and 10 percent to symptoms of bipolar disorder. “When we hear about crimes committed by people with mental illness, they tend to be big headline-making crimes so they get stuck in people’s heads,” the Web site quotes lead researcher Jillian Peterson, PhD. “The vast majority of people with mental illness are not violent, not criminal and not dangerous...

I've been thinking a lot about Trayvon.  But it really didn't hit home until a friend posted on Facebook that she didn't want to have to worry about her two black boys as they grow up. I know those boys.  The older was a friend of my son's when they were younger.  The younger I know only as a baby, and what a beautiful one.  To think of these precious children at risk just because they're boys, and black, stopped my heart for a minute. But that's what all this is really about.  The stigma and dread black boys and men live with every day of their lives.  As President Obama said yesterday, he, too, has been followed in department stores and heard locks click on cars when he was walking by. How can you live this way?  Yet we expect members of the black race to endure this, no, expect this, when they go out into the world.  President Obama also gave voice to the fact that very often, it's black men who are committing the crimes.  But how e...