Next week, people in California will vote to legalize marijuana (or keep it illegal). I have been treating both mental illness and drug addiction for many years and have not been shy about making my point of view known here in the Therapy Soup at PsychCentral and in other venues.

Republicans “have a lower threshold for processing threatening stimuli from ambiguous social information.” Democrats, on the other hand, “showed greater emotional distress, including higher rates of crying behaviors, trait aggression, emotional pain and lower life satisfaction.”

If Mr. Williams doesn’t see a psychiatrist, what possible motivation does Ms. Schiller have for suggesting he does? Certainly, it sounds like her motivation is to impugn and malign him in some way since it seems that she believes that those who might need psychiatric treatment are stigmatized in some way.

We heard about the comments he made and the firing this morning in an email from a good friend and colleague. She is adamant that if Juan Williams had been white and had made those comments on NPR rather than on their nemesis, Fox news, he wouldn’t have been fired.

The most obvious flawed studies, or at least the one’s easiest to spot for most thinking people are probably those studies released during election weeks (and those cleverly-timed book releases), in which, depending on the bias of the researcher, Liberals or Conservatives or Democrats or Republicans are “proven” to be immature fantastasists, simmering stews of latent hatred and intolerance, or possessors of below-average intelligence.

Traditionally, the great mystical masters aren’t admired for their powers—though they may be rather impressive; they are admired for their generosity, their willingness to help and inspire others, and very importantly, their humility. In other words—they are admired for their humanity rather than their razzle-dazzle mystical abilities. That’s what wows us. That’s what we want to emulate.

We’ve been reading a lot about how the health care bill is changing Americans’ health care, but very little about how it is impacting mental health care. How about you? Has your mental health care changed due to the health care bill? If so, how?

In fact, according to Kabbalah, the ability to treat yourself with profound respect, caring for body, mind, and soul with the understanding that every life, including yours, is precious, is crucial to your spiritual development.

You may have caught this heartrending headline: 1000 Kenyan Teachers Fired for Raping Girls. Over the past two years the teachers were arrested for raping girls between the ages of 12 and 15.

Even the most well-meaning and mature parent, if going through a rancorous divorce, might occasionally let fly a comment about the other parent. That’s not what we’re talking about. What we’re talking about is a parent who repeatedly teaches a child to hate the other parent. And it doesn’t always happen to divorced couples—it can happen while parents are still married to each other.