Comedian: I grew up with mental illness

• Howie Mandel has OCD, ADHD and depression


• Mandel wants mental health resources available for children


• He says taking care of mental health should be as routine as for physical health

(CNN) -- Howie Mandel endured ridicule from other kids as a child because when his shoelaces came undone, he would limp around without tying them.

He didn't want to handle the laces because they had touched the ground, and he thought they were dirty.

Mandel, a Canadian comedian, later learned that he has obsessive compulsive disorder, a condition characterized by repetitive thoughts, impulses or images, and behaviors performed over and over. Some people with OCD wash their hands excessively or check to see if doors are locked multiple times.

About 2.2 million Americans have OCD, according to the National Institutes of Health. Research has suggested the condition runs in families.

Tell us your storyWe love to hear from our audience. Follow @CNNHealth on Twitter and Facebook for the latest health news and let us know what we're missing.

Mandel also has attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder and depression.

"As a child I didn't know that these things even existed," he told CNN's Erin Burnett. "I knew that I felt isolated."

Mandel said his OCD is more complicated than he has led people to believe. It's not as straightforward as a fear of germs.

"I know intellectually that if I shake somebody's hand that I'm not going to get sick and die," he said.

But there have been times when Mandel has touched something or someone and then obsessed for the rest of the day about it, trapped in a "never ending obsessive-compulsive world."

Mandel recently appeared on "The Tonight Show" with Jay Leno, and dipped his hand into a large bowl of hand sanitizer before shaking hands with the host. Mandel admitted to Burnett that he made the situation "more dramatic than it was," and that it was actually not a big problem to touch Leno's hand.

"I don't know when it's going to be a big problem," he said.

A big concern of Mandel's is that there are no routine resources in place for mental health for young people, the way there are for physical health.

Mandel said that just like parents take their children to pediatricians and dentists, mental health -- such as counseling -- should also be part of the picture.

"We take care of our dental health," he said. "We don't take care of our mental health."

Mandel acknowledged that some people with mental illnesses are overmedicated; at the same time, some sufferers of colds want to take antibiotics unnecessarily.

But Mandel is more concerned about helping people cope with their life situations, both those who have diagnosed mental illnesses and those who do not.

ADHD: Who makes the diagnosis?

"We are so behind in the world as to not have something in place that just teaches everyone how to cope," he said.

The embarrassment and stigma surrounding mental health issues needs to end, he said.

"I think the solution to making this world better is if we would just be healthy, mentally," Mandel said.

Follow Elizabeth Landau on Twitter at @lizlandau

Ash columns more than a mile high

Mount Sinabung fills the sky over Karo, North Sumatra, Indonesia, with smoke and ash as it erupts on Saturday, February 1. The volcano has been erupting since September.

Villagers flee as Mount Sinabung erupts on Saturday, February 1, in North Sumatra, Indonesia.

Mount Sinabung spews volcanic materials on February 1.

A villager looks for belongings among debris at a house damaged by ash and mud from eruptions of Mount Sinabung on January 12.

Women evacuate with their children to a temporary evacuation center on January 8 after their village is hit by ash.

People watch as Mount Sinabung smokes.

Hot lava runs down Mount Sinabung, one of Indonesia's highest mountains, from a lava dome on January 5.

Mount Sinabung spews ash and lava during an eruption.

Crops were damaged and covered in ash.

Mount Sinabung spews ash into the air on January 7.

A village is covered in ash.

Villagers harvest tomatoes from fields covered in ash.

A man helps children onto a truck as residents are evacuated.

A man holds his son at a temporary evacuation center.

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• The incident occurred in North Sumatra


• The victims were hit by hot ash clouds


• A recovery operation was set for Sunday

Jakarta, Indonesia (CNN) -- Plumes of ash spewed more than a mile into the sky and descended in superheated clouds impossible for those too close to the volcano to escape. By the time the latest eruption ended at Mount Sinabung in North Sumatra, at least 14 people had been killed, a government official told CNN.

The victims, and at least three other injured people, were all found in Sukameriah, a village close to the volcano's crater, disaster mitigation agency spokesman Sutopo Purwo Nugroho told CNN.

Indonesia volcano erupts

The Sinabung volcano erupts and spews hot smoke in Karo, Indonesia, on November 10.

Mount Etna spews lava during an eruption as seen from the Sicilian town of Acireale Saturday, November 16.

Lava from the Puu Oo cone of Kilauea Volcano reaches the Pacific Ocean on the southeastern coast of Hawaii Island, Hawaii, on Monday evening, January 7, 2013. Puu Oo has been erupting for 30 years. This eruption, on the volcano's east rift, began January 3, 1983.

Smoke and ash spew from Mount Sakurajima on October 7, 2013 in Kagoshima, Japan.

The Karymsky volcano erupts on January 2 in Kamchatka, Russia.

The Tungurahua volcano is seen on December 20, 2012. The volcano has been in eruption since 1999.

The Copahue volcano emits smoke and she above Caviahue, in Neuquen province of Argentina on December 24, 2012.

Western Mexico's Colima volcano in emits lava on October 2, 2004. The Global Volcanism Program reported "a bright thermal anomaly" as well as gas emission on November 9.

Photos: Recently active volcanos

Local search and rescue teams were scheduled to go on a recovery operation Sunday morning, he said.

Eruptions at Mount Sinabung are becoming common. After about 400 years of minimal volcanic activity there, Sinabung erupted in 2010. It has been spewing gas since September.

The English-language Jakarta Post said while 31 people previously had died from eruption-related illnesses such as depression, asthma and hypertension, Saturday's deaths were the first ones directly attributed to volcanic output.

Last month, intensifying volcanic activity displaced 22,000 people who live nearby.

The evacuees had been moved to temporary camps, and more than half were allowed to return home on Friday.

Saturday's victims lived within a 3-kilometer radius of the volcano. Some were there checking on their homes or were there just to watch the eruptions, Nugroho said.

The government issued the highest level of alert for the latest eruptions.

The newest volcanic activity has forced people to evacuate 16 villages, the Jakarta Post reported.

Live video of the volcano

Kathy Quiano wrote and reported on this story from Indonesia, and Mark Morgenstein wrote in Atlanta.

Could you snatch away a kid's lunch?

• Jason Marsh: Stories of school lunches grabbed from kids, man ignored by rescuers draw shock


• How does this happen? Studies show people all too blindly obey rules, authority, he says


• Marsh: It's surmountable. People can be reminded of humanity, taught empathy


• Marsh: Story of boy, on his own instincts, urging mom to check on fallen neighbor gives hope

Editor's note: Jason Marsh is the founding editor-in-chief of the online magazine Greater Good, published by the Greater Good Science Center, which focuses on the "science of a meaningful life" and is based at the University of California at Berkeley.

(CNN) -- Two recent incidents have people questioning the basic goodness of humanity.

In Washington, a man had a fatal heart attack across the street from a fire station. Passers-by said firefighters refused to help him because they hadn't been officially dispatched.

At an elementary school in Salt Lake City, staff members seized and discarded children's lunches because their parents owed money on their accounts. (School administrators apologized.)

Officials in Washington say they are "furious" at the firefighters' inaction. A mother of one of the students in Utah says she was "blind-sided" by the school's actions, and a state senator says he is "incredibly disappointed."

The anger and bewilderment are understandable. But neither incident seems that shocking when considered in light of decades of study of the psychology of obedience and power. Researchers have repeatedly found that allegiance to rules and protocols routinely trumps people's consciences and sense of basic moral responsibility.

Most famously, studies by Stanley Milgram at Yale University in the 1960s found that ordinary people were willing to give what they believed were fatal electric shocks to their partners in a bogus "memory experiment" simply because a researcher in a white lab coat told them to. The people supposedly getting shocked (who were working with Milgram and not being hurt at all) hollered and pleaded for the shocks to stop, which distressed many of the people administering them, but they kept at it. In fact, roughly two-thirds of the participants kept giving shocks until they had reached the highest voltage level possible, a percentage far higher than Milgram or any of his colleagues anticipated.

In a similar vein, the infamous Stanford Prison Experiment run by psychologist Philip Zimbardo took typical Stanford University undergrads and randomly assigned them to be guards or prisoners in a makeshift jail. The guards completely took on their new roles and meted out cruel and sadistic treatment to their "prisoners."

Utah school snatches students' lunches

Firemen on leave after refusal to help man

The authority they were given and the rules they were asked to enforce blinded them to what was right — and perhaps the same could be said for those school officials and firefighters.

It's important to keep in mind that the participants in Milgram and Zimbardo's studies weren't necessarily bad people. They were likely no worse than you or me. They, too, were likely "blind-sided by the surprisingly strong ways that rules and circumstance can dictate our behavior. While we would like to believe that humanity has evolved since the 1960s, other researchers have achieved similar results in more recent years.

Is the upshot of all this that we're condemned to be unprincipled sheep? That a few rules and regulations can easily blind us to the better angels of our nature?

Not so fast. The research shows that while external influences on our behavior can be strong, they are not insurmountable.

We can overcome these influences simply by becoming more aware of them. One set of studies found that when people attended social psychology lectures explaining how external pressures can inhibit moral behavior, they became less susceptible to those pressures.

Other evidence suggests that being reminded of one's similarities or common humanity with a person in need can motivate us to come to their aid, even when doing so puts ourselves at risk. Perhaps if bystanders' appeals to those firefighters had struck a more personal chord with them, they might have been jarred into action.

Finally, throughout history, we have seen examples of people who displayed great altruism, even heroism, while most everyone around them remained bystanders to evil — or perpetrators of it. Some evidence suggests that the roots of this caring behavior extend back into childhood. A seminal study by Samuel and Pearl Oliner suggests that one commonality of people who rescued Jews during the Holocaust was that their parents nurtured empathy in them, such as by encouraging them to see the world from other points of view and emphasizing the universal similarity of people.

Indeed, the childhood roots of altruism were evoked by another story in the news this week: the story of 10-year-old Danny DiPietro, who noticed that something seemed awry in a neighbor's garage and pressured his mother to investigate.

Despite his mother's resistance, Danny persisted until his mother agreed to walk down the street. She found an 80-year-old neighbor who had slipped, couldn't get up, and likely would have died had she spent much more time trapped outside in the freezing cold. Rather than remaining quiet or succumbing to the pressure not to make waves, Danny stayed attuned to his moral instincts—"something just didn't feel right," he said.

Sometimes it's nice to be reminded that while sensing what's right can get complicated by adult rules and regulations, it can still come naturally to kids.

Follow us on Twitter @CNNOpinion.

Join us on Facebook/CNNOpinion.

The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of Jason Marsh.

Dispute over DNA, alleged weapon

The knife: The prosecution in 2009 said that a knife found in Raffaele Sollecito's house has the DNA of Amanda Knox on the handle and the DNA of victim Meredith Kercher on the blade, suggesting it's the murder weapon. The defense said the knife doesn't match the shape and size of wounds on Kercher's body or an outline of the knife left on her bed. The defense also presented experts who said DNA on the blade was too small to be definitive.

DNA on Kercher's bra clasp: The prosecution said that a bra clasp that was ripped from Kercher's bra and found on the floor of her room has Sollecito's DNA on it, proving he was in the room when she was killed. The defense said the bra clasp is contaminated and essentially tainted evidence because it was moved around the crime scene and left there for more than six weeks before it was picked up as evidence.

Knox's confession: The prosecution said that during her interrogation, Knox said she could hear Kercher screaming. She also pointed the finger early on at Patrick Lumumba, who was eventually released. The prosecution said Knox's false statement proves she is lying and was at the home when Kercher was killed. The defense said that Knox's statements were made when she was asked to imagine what would have happened that night in her apartment. The defense said Knox pointed the finger at Lumumba because she was confused and pressured. Eventually, the confession was thrown out because Knox was not questioned with a lawyer present.

Bloody footprint on bathroom rug: The prosecution attributed a bloody footprint on a rug in the bathroom to Sollecito, which they said proves he was there at the time of the murder. The defense, in this instance Sollecito's lawyers, presented forensic experts who said the print was in no way a match to Sollecito, but instead a match to Rudy Guede, a man from the Ivory Coast who was convicted in a separate trial for murdering Kercher. The defense focused on Sollecito's hammer toe, which they said wouldn't leave an imprint like the print found on the mat.

The window: The prosecution said a broken window in the home Knox shared with Kercher was an attempt by the American to stage a break-in as a cover for the murder. The prosecution said it would be impossible for someone to break the window and climb through the window as proposed by the defense. The defense said the window was broken by Guede, a known drifter who had broken into homes before. Defense expert Francesco Pasquali simulated how glass would break if a rock were thrown from the outside. His testimony included that he believes a burglar could have thrown a rock that way.

Allegations of crime scene contamination: The defense argued that several pieces of key DNA were contaminated at the scene. Crime scene video shows investigators sometimes not wearing gloves or hair coverings, prodding their fingers in Kercher's wounds, leaving key pieces of evidence at the scene for weeks and moving them around, and at one point breaking a window for no reason. The prosecution argued that all the evidence was indeed properly handled and that it isn't their job to prove the crime scene work was good enough. Instead, they said, that's the job of the defense.

Bloody shoe print in Kercher's room: The prosecution said the bloody shoe print found next to Kercher's body belonged to Sollecito and placed him in Kercher's room when she was murdered. The defense said that after Guede was found to have a shoe box for shoes matching the print, they argued for a re-examination of the print. Francesco Vinci, a coroner and forensic specialist for Sollecito, testified he believes it was wrongly attributed to Sollecito and belongs to Guede.

• Italian court convicted Amanda Knox and Raffaele Sollecito of murder -- again


• The two were convicted in 2009 and acquitted on appeal in 2011


• Opposing sides argues over what is revealed by alleged murder weapon, DNA evidence

Editor's note: This is an edited version of a story first published in November 2009 during the first murder trial of Amanda Knox and Rafaelle Sollecito looking at the disputed evidence in the case, which has largely remained the same.

(CNN) -- Within weeks of British student Meredith Kercher's death in the vibrant college town of Perugia, Italy, in 2007, prosecutors and police declared the case closed.

They'd seized two knives in their search for the murder weapon. They took DNA from the room where Kercher was killed. And at least one suspect had confessed to being at the murder scene. Or so they said.

Kercher had been stabbed in a sexual misadventure, officials said. And they knew the killers.

American Amanda Knox, Kercher's roommate; Italian Raffaele Sollecito, Knox's former boyfriend; and Ivory Coast native Rudy Guede, a drifter known in the area, had their pictures splattered across the world's media.

Knox's photo was even hung in the police plaza alongside Italy's most infamous mobsters and criminals.

The prosecution case seemed a sensational slam-dunk, almost too good to be true.

Knox's supporters say that's because it is.

"In the beginning, all of this supposed evidence was being leaked, showing what sounded like a pretty convincing case," Anne Bremner, a lawyer and former prosecutor working with the group Friends of Amanda, told CNN.

Dershowitz: Lots of evidence against Knox

DNA expert: Science was ignored for Knox

The case couldn't look more different depending on where you stand.

That is as true now, following Knox and Sollecito's second conviction Thursday, as it was during the first trial that ended in two convictions in 2009 and the appeal in 2011 that acquitted them based on "lack of evidence."

6 things to know about the Amanda Knox verdict

Italy's Supreme Court decided in 2013 to retry the case, saying the jury that acquitted Knox and Sollecito didn't consider all the evidence, and that discrepancies in testimony needed to be answered.

On Thursday the acquittals were overturned, and Knox, who remains at her home in Seattle, was sentenced in absentia to 28½ years in prison. Sollecito was sentenced to 25 years.

Knox vowed Friday to fight her conviction "until the very end" and said she "will never go willingly" back to Italy. Her lawyers say they will appeal the ruling.

Speaking on ABC's "Good Morning America," Knox said news of the guilty verdict Thursday "really has hit me like a train."

Amanda Knox: I'm going to fight this

Guilty...once again

Knox conviction raises new questions

"I did not expect this to happen. I really expected so much better from the Italian justice system," she said. "They found me innocent before. How can they say that it's guilt beyond a reasonable doubt?

Italian authorities on Friday stopped Sollecito near the border with Austria and Slovenia, Italian police told CNN.

Sollecito, who is not allowed to leave Italy while the legal process continues, was halted in the northern Italian town of Udine, police said. Sollecito's lawyer told CNN his client never intended to flee the country, but he was driving with his girlfriend to her house in Udine, when they were forced to stop due to snow.

Same evidence, two very different conclusions

The case has always been about the evidence. But how you view the evidence, simply depends on what side you believe. It all comes down to disputed DNA.

In Knox's corner: her friends and family from Seattle, Washington.

For them, she is the victim -- railroaded by an overzealous Italian prosecutor, whose credibility was marred by allegations of prosecutorial misconduct in another case.

Knox's supporters say he's tried to force the evidence to fit his theory of what happened. And with negative and often false details about the case appearing in the press -- all for the world to read -- Knox supporters feared she would be convicted regardless of the facts.

On the other side: Perugia's prosecutor Giuliano Mignini. For him and his colleagues, the answer is simple -- Guede, Knox and Sollecito are all responsible for leaving Kercher partially clothed, strangled and with her throat cut on November 2, 2007.

Timeline: Murder to now

And the two sides still couldn't be further apart on how they view the very evidence that has over the course of nearly seven years both been used to find her guilty and to overturn that ruling.

Independent experts testified during the in 2011 appeal that they believed some of the evidence had been contaminated.

The testimony fueled the fire that started during the first trial about the effectiveness of Italy's justice system given widespread doubts over the handling of the investigation and key pieces of evidence.

But Italian prosecutors, police and those who collected the evidence maintain those arguments are nothing more than last-ditch efforts by a pair guilty of murdering Kercher in cold blood.

And the second conviction shows the Italian court, this time, believes the prosecution. But questions about the specific pieces evidence that led to two convictions and one acquittal still continue.

The murder weapon: The knife

The crime scene was gruesome. The 21-year old British student was found under a duvet on the floor by her bed, covered in blood. A bloody handprint was streaked on the wall above her.

A source close to the prosecution says Kercher was held down while she was strangled and stabbed. The source says Sollecito's 6 ½-inch kitchen knife was used to slit her throat and then taken back to his apartment.

Knox's DNA is on the handle and that of Kercher is on the blade, said a source close to the prosecution who did not wish to be identified discussing an ongoing case.

Kercher had never been to Sollecito's apartment and wouldn't have come in contact with the knife, he said, yet there was her DNA. Those "unmistakable facts" show the knife played a role in the murder, the source said.

What's next for Amanda Knox?

Bremner and experts testifying for the defense say there is no way that specific knife could be the murder weapon.

Dr. Carlo Torre, a leading forensics expert in Italy, testified that the knife taken from Sollecito's apartment wouldn't have made the wounds on Kercher's body.

"It doesn't match the size or shape [of the wounds,]" Bremner told CNN. "And Sollecito's knife also doesn't match a bloody outline of a knife left on the bedding."

Bremner, who offered her legal advice pro bono to the Knox family, questioned the validity of the DNA evidence, saying the knife had been "improperly transported in a shoe box."

Furthermore, Bremner said the jury heard from defense expert Sarah Gino, a geneticist and private coroner in Italy, who said that the DNA sample was too small to be definitive. Bremner said the presence of Knox's DNA on the knife handle was no surprise, as the couple had dinner at his house occasionally.

Prosecutors have maintained just because the knife doesn't match everything doesn't mean it wasn't used. The source close to the prosecution said it was possible, based on the wounds, that several different items made them.

Damning DNA or 'Fellini Forensics'

On the night Kercher was killed, Knox and her boyfriend say they were at his house watching a movie and smoking hashish.

Their recollection of events, they admitted, was hazy from the drugs, but both swore they went back to the house the next morning. Knox says she was unable to gain entry - and called police.

For their case, prosecutors had to prove that Knox and Sollecito - who had recently started dating - were lying and place them at the home when Kercher was killed.

Some reports spoke of a scurry of people - more than one - on the night of the murder around the house. It was a positive lead for prosecutor Mignini - but came to nothing in court.

But the prosecution had more evidence in the form of a bra clasp, one that fell to the floor after the murderer cut Kercher's bra in half before she was killed.

And on it was Sollecito's DNA.

Bremner says that evidence on the clasp is fundamentally flawed, like much from the crime scene collection, calling the work "Fellini forensics."

"In the [crime scene] video, you can see it went from being white in color to nearly black because it got so dirty being moved around," Bremner said of the clasp, noting that tainted the only evidence that placed Sollecito at the scene.

Bremner described other errors she saw on the crime scene video.

"They were putting their fingers in Kercher's wound, they were shaking out evidence, picking up hairs and dropping them," she said. "Some people didn't wear gloves or had their hair draping on the floor, they crashed into a window at one point and threw aside evidence. It was just wrong on all levels."

The prosecution source maintains the crime scene was handled properly, and the evidence shows what it shows.

A big win for Italy or the 'greatest travesty' ever?

Knox's introduction to the world came in a whirlwind of tabloid headlines.

The prosecution touted hard evidence early that they said unquestionably showed they had their killers.

There was a footprint in Knox and Kercher's bathroom that was attributed to Sollecito - though later analysts admitted it belonged to Guede, who was convicted of Kercher's murder in 2008.

The prosecution also presented what they called a confession by Knox, but Knox later said any apparent admission she was at the scene was made when investigators told her to imagine what she might have seen if she had been there.

The argument became moot when a higher court ruled the alleged confession could not be used because the statement was made without an attorney or translator present.

The tabloid headlines continue as Knox's third ruling was handed down and she was convicted for a second time.

Media around the world focused early on Knox's sexual history, what clothes she wears to court and whether a bump on her lip means the girl they dubbed "Foxy Knoxy" has herpes.

From then on it has all been distraction from the lack of evidence, Bremner said.

"It's the greatest travesty of a prosecution ever," Bremner said. "It's so ludicrous. You've got to have a theory, or a motive, but the theory has to fit the facts somehow. And in this case, there's no solid evidence, no motive and no match whatsoever."

Knox's supporters maintain that the prosecution did get one thing right - putting Guede behind bars. He chose a fast-track trial, separate from Sollecito and Knox, and was convicted of murder and attempted sexual assault and sentenced to 30 years. They believe he was Kercher's sole killer. He appealed the verdict, which was upheld, but his sentence was reduced to 16 years.

Supporters of Knox and Sollecito say they are only being prosecuted because the pair was flaunted so publicly as the killers for so long that it would look bad for officials to admit they got it wrong.

The prosecution source rejects that, and portrays Knox, Sollecito and Guede as three people who together ended the life of the young British woman. And they say the way Knox originally pointed the finger at another man - who was cleared with an alibi - shows she had something to hide.

Both sides agree the truth is in the evidence; the question is which truth reveals what really happened the night Kercher died. And the truth may be, we'll never know.