Jonathan Shay is a Boston psychiatrist who specializes in combat trauma and is the author of Odysseus in America: Combat Trauma and the Trials of Homecoming. He won a 2007 MacArthur Foundation “genius grant” for his work.

The Coming Home Project in San Francisco was developed by clinical psychologist and Zen teacher Joseph Bobrow to support armed service members returning from combat and their families. Contact through their website.

Shira Gabriel is an assistant professor of psychology at the University at Buffalo in Buffalo, N.Y., who has conducted three studies on celebrity worship, one of which focused on how it boosts the worshipper’s self-esteem.

Read a July 1, 2004, article by Carlin Flora about celebrity worship syndrome. It’s posted on the Psychology Today Web site.

Rhett Diessner is a psychology professor at Lewis-Clark State College in Lewiston, Idaho. He wrote Psyche and Eros: Bahá’í Studies in a Spiritual Psychology.

Michael Penn is a member of the Bahá’í Faith and a psychology professor and licensed clinical psychologist at Franklin & Marshall College in Lancaster, Pa. His research interests and publications include works in the pathogenesis of hope and hopelessness, adolescent psychopathology, the relationship between culture and psychopathology, and the epidemiology of gender-based violence.

Benjamin Beit-Hallahmi is a psychology professor emeritus at the University of Haifa in Israel. His areas of expertise include the psychology of religion. He wrote an article titled “Scientology: Religion or racket?” that was published in September 2003 by the Marburg Journal of Religion.

Read a May 1991 Time magazine cover story about Scientology. The church took great exception to the article, which went on to receive the Gerald Loeb Award for distinguished business and financial journalism, the Worth Bingham Prize and the Conscience in Media Award from the American Society of Journalists and Authors. Article requires log-in and payment to access.

The Tampa Bay Times published a three-part series on the Church of Scientology in June 2009. Read the third installment, published June 23, 2009.