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It may not have helped Adam Lanza to know this about himself, but a new study has shown that patients with schizophrenia cannot imitate or mimic others. So?  Believe it or not, that's how we learn social interaction. Lanza is the person who killed 20 first graders and six educators, along with his mother, in December 2012, in a small Connecticut town. According to psychologists, "Iimitation is something that we all do whenever we learn a new skill, whether it is dancing or how to behave in specific social situations," newswise.com reports. In the study,  when patients with schizophrenia were asked to imitate simple hand movements, "their brains exhibited abnormal brain activity in areas associated with the ability to imitate," the Web site notes. “The ability to imitate is present early in life and is crucial for learning how to navigate the social world,"  newswise quotes first author Katharine Thakkar, who conducted much of the research while ...

It's those with mental illness. According to Nicholas Bakalar, " people with mental illness may be at sharply increased risk of dying by homicide, a new study has found." Bakalar reported that, "after controlling for age, education level, income and other factors, they found that   people with mental illness were almost five times as likely to be a victim of murder as a person without a psychiatric diagnosis ." Substance abusers, for obvious reasons, were among those most likely to be victims of homicide -- 9 times the risk of the average population. Those with personality disorders were next, at triple the risk of the general population, while depressed people had 2 1/2 times the risk, and those with anxiety or schizophrenia had about twice the risk, Bakalar noted. It's been talked and talked about how our mental health system needs shoring up, if not rebuilding. But what's one of the first programs to be slashed when the budget-cutters come out? ...