The wellness set is intensely puritanical, if not savagely judgemental. Tolerance for human frailty, a feature of the Judeo-Christian ethic for two millennia, is out the window. If you don’t follow a healthy lifestyle and fall ill, you have nobody to blame but yourself. For a cancer-cure scammer of Belle Gibson's brazenness such people and their money were sitting ducks

For those who care deeply about the profession and its goal to treat genuinely debilitating conditions, the state of the profession is cause for deep dismay. Needed is nothing less than a thorough review of the framework in which psychiatry operates, plus a clear plan for its future

That unfortunate American tendency to shoot presidents necessarily sets more than the wheels of justice turning, it also inspires a morbid curiosity about the factors which might conceivably have inspired their killers. For the medico Spitzkas, father and son,  such quests were their stock in trade

Arnold Sodeman went to the gallows in 1936 at Melbourne's Pentridge Jail, convicted by a jury which rejected the advice of Australia's leading psychiatrist that he be spared on grounds of episodic insanity prompted by childhood brain injury. The truth would emerge only on the autopsy table

One of Sydney's ambulatory landmarks, Bee Miles was a spectacle known for years and to millions for her antic eccentricities, not least her assaults on taxi drivers. That she detested her father was the supreme irony, as his disdain for convention shaped her most of all

When researching his classic account of random murder, Truman Capote largely overlooked another enigmatic subject in Lowell Lee Andrews, a death-row neighbour of the killers he profiled. One doesn't need to be mad to murder one's entire family, as the trial concluded, but it helps

Machado-Joseph Disease is thought to have originated amongst Sephardic Jews in Portugal during the Middle Ages. Unlocking the secret of how it came to afflict so many victims in the Indigenous communities of the Far North is a genetic detective story

Do psychopaths breed more psychopaths? The bloody history of the van Schoor family of South Africa certainly seems to suggests as much, as do other clans where murder seems to run in the family. Nature or nurture, their homicidal histories are playgrounds for speculation

In 1960, mystified Chinese mountaineers found a woman's shoe on the high inclines of the world's tallest mountain. Had they known a little more about the Englishman who spurned all advice and conventional equipment when he set out alone in 1933 to reach the summit, they would not have been so surprised