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While there may be genetic predispositions toward depression and addiction, a predisposition is not the same as a predetermination. Death, Robin Williams once said, is “the ultimate closing.” The turbulent comic genius found that closing recently, at his own hands.
As a Jewish youngster growing up in Budapest, an infant survivor of the Nazi genocide, I was for years haunted by a question resounding in my brain with such force that sometimes my head would spin: “How was it possible? How could the world have let such horrors happen?”

Many parents would be horrified at the sadism their children favour as entertainment. Ought they to be worried? In Hostel, the gore flick young audiences have made into North America’s top-grossing theatre attraction, human beings perpetrate on one another whatever can be accomplished with knives, hooks, scalpels, tongs, drills, pincers and electrical saws. Paxton and […]

The signs of trauma have been unmistakable for years: the obesity, the bombast, the bellicose defensiveness, the need to project a larger-than-life persona as compensation for low self-esteem.

Until his death, former U.S. president Ronald Reagan was the world’s most famous Alzheimer’s sufferer. “I now begin the journey that will lead me into the sunset of my life,” he wrote in his poignant farewell message to Americans when he was first diagnosed at 83. The acknowledgment marked the formal onset of his long, […]

When our two grown-up sons were in elementary school, my wife and I despaired of their ever getting along. Bickering, insults, mutual recrimination and, at times, physical altercations were the order of the day. The seemingly incessant squabbling went on for years. Our older son in particular appeared determined to make his brother’s life utterly […]

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