Those without mental health issues equate their feelings of sadness to those of someone with depression, when in reality this is like comparing a small paper cut to a broken arm. This characterization is entirely misguided however, as mental health issues are not a "First World Problem" but instead a problem which has the potential to affect all humans regardless of class, race, gender, or ethnicity.

Hopefully, the horrors of the Newtown, Connecticut shooting will lead to a more sensible attitude to violence and mental illness and to improved treatment for the hardest to treat. Whenever a tragedy like this occurs, mental health bureaucrats repeat their mantra that violence is not typical for the mentally ill who are more often the victims rather than the perpetrators.

Monday morning marked the long-awaited release of Wally T. Oppal's Missing Women Commission of Inquiry report. To say commissioning this report was a bit controversial is like saying Pickton himself was a bit murdery. Oppal's investigation basically entailed a jaunty stroll across a packed minefield of modern Canada's touchiest subjects including racism, sexism, classism, aboriginal politics, the sex trade, mental illness, alcoholism, drug abuse, bureaucratic cruelty and police incompetence, all headed by a party hack from an embattled provincial government that might very well poll worse than all the others put together.

I planned to write about Christmas today. Specifically, what I want for Christmas. But it doesn't seem right when that's not at all what caught my attention this week. What's in my head and my heart, on my Facebook feed and Twitter stream, in my inbox and in so many conversations I have had is the horrors and devastation from the Newtown, Connecticut shootings of last Friday.

We've seen the same debates take place after the shootings in Aurora, Colorado, Virginia Tech, and every time, pundits miss the point. Simply put, there is no antidote for evil. The notion that simply changing the laws will take away the pain and suffering of this tragedy or even prevent future ones from occurring is simply not true.

Relatives of a 6-year-old girl who was among the 20 children killed in a shooting massacre at a Connecticut elementary school on Friday say her family...

What exactly is so "unthinkable" about Friday's school shooting in Newtown, Connecticut, when it almost seems to happen on a regular basis? There is public outpouring of "sentiment" across all forms of social media and then...Nothing. It's time for the supposedly sentimental to drop the notion that this is not the moment for discussion, but rather the time for emotion and prayer. President Obama should not be crying, the flag should not be lowered; they ought to do away with temporary sentimentality, and finally take action regarding gun control. After all, with so many of these types of tragedies under their belt, shouldn't the Americans be rather immune to this sort of thing?

Just shortly after the news that 20 small children were killed in Connecticut, the White House Press Secretary said "today is not the day" to engage in a policy debate over gun control. But it hardly matters if we all agree that shooting schoolchildren is terrible if we don't do anything to prevent it in the future -- and that is difficult to do in a society that promotes gun culture to even its youngest members.