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'If you met me, you'd never know I was mentally ill. In fact, I've gone through most of my adult life without anyone ever knowing - except when I've had to reveal it to a doctor. And that revelation changes everything. It wipes clean the rest of my résumé, my education, my accomplishments, reduces me to a diagnosis. I was surprised when, after one of these run-ins, my psychopharmacologist said this sort of behavior was all too common. At least 14 studies have shown that patients with a serious mental illness receive worse medical care than "normal" people. Last year the World Health Organization called the stigma and discrimination endured by people with mental health conditions "a hidden human rights emergency." If you met me, you'd never know I was mentally ill. In fact, I've gone through most of my adult life without anyone ever knowing - except when I've had to reveal it to a doctor. And that revelation changes everything. It wipes clean the rest of my résumé, my education, my accomplishments, reduces me to a diagnosis. I was surprised when, after one of these run-ins, my psychopharmacologist said this sort of behavior was all too common. At least 14 studies have shown that patients with a serious mental illness receive worse medical care than "normal" people. Last year the World Health Organization called the stigma and discrimination endured by people with mental health conditions "a hidden human rights emergency." I never knew it until I started poking around, but this particular kind of discriminatory doctoring has a name. It's called "diagnostic overshadowing." According to a review of studies done by the Institute of Psychiatry at King's College, London, it happens a lot. As a result, people with a serious mental illness - including bipolar disorder, major depression, schizophrenia and schizoaffective disorder - end up with wrong diagnoses and are under-treated. That is a problem, because if yo

I refused further radiation and chemotherapy. I lay in my bed and watched the events around me - the distress of my family, the helplessness of my doctors - without anxiety, comfortable that I had made the correct decision. My doctors couldn't override it or persuade me to change my mind, but, luckily, my wife, Diana, could and did. From my mental cocoon in the hospital bed, I could sense Diana at my side. "You're going to finish the treatment," she said softly. I did not have the energy, or perhaps the will, to disagree. She wheeled me down herself to finish my radiation treatments in the basement of the hospital.

'I recently explored what Google searches tell us about depression, by which I mean, loosely, dips in mood. [I used] anonymous, aggregate data from tens of millions of queries.... thanks to the incredibly large sample size, meaningful patterns emerge. According to the data, depression is highest in April. Depression is lowest in August. The state with the highest rate of depression is North Dakota; the one with the lowest, Virginia. The city with the highest rate is Presque Isle, Me.; the city with the lowest, San Francisco. Depression is, unsurprisingly, highest on Mondays and lowest on Saturdays. The date on which depression is lowest is Dec. 25, followed by a few days surrounding it. The strongest predictor by far: an area's average temperature in January. Colder places have higher rates of depression, with the correlation concentrated in the colder months. Google searches, the biggest data source we currently have, are unambiguous: when it comes to our happiness, climate matters a great deal. There is a lesson here for public health and medical researchers. Are you investigating how weather affects migraine headaches? How chemicals in water affect autism rates? I believe we are about to enter a golden age of disease research. Many of the biggest developments will come from the analysis of big data, not from traditional experiments that survey a relatively small number of people.