10 Ways to Stay Informed: Sites Dedicated to Mental Health

Continuing with my previous post “Mental Links: A Guide to the Authorities in Mental Health”, I have once again scoured the web for reliable and up-to-date resources to post for the assistance of others who wish for information on the topic of mental health. However, unlike my last post, these most recent links are more dedicated to information on pharmaceuticals and their misuse in the psychiatric field. As before, I have kept in mind the Webby Awards Criteria and the IMSA Criteria during my search and have offered here the top ten I have found to be most useful and authoritative.

DB’s Medical Rants, for one, is a blog covering a wide range of topics on health and pharmaceuticals. The blog, being posted by a very prestigious doctor, contains a great deal of authority and receives fresh posts on a daily basis, currently containing over 3000 posts. Unfortunately, “DB” does not make use of visual aids or graphics of any kind. “Atypical Antipsychotics”, another blog, shares this deficit. However, it makes up for this by being updated several times daily and providing recent information on harmful drugs in mental health and the negative effects of irresponsible prescriptions. Unlike these blogs, “The Last Psychiatrist” contains a humorous and entertaining twist to an otherwise grave topic, and manages to do so in a way that remains informative and insightful. Although the authority behind the author of “The Last Psychiatrist” is questionable, his sources are reliable. Stepping out of the blogosphere, I’d like to direct interested parties to “Psychiatric Services” and “Advances in Psychiatric Treatment”, two websites which feature online databases of medical journal PDFs in the psychiatric field; two sites most commendable on their levels of concrete and referenceable data and most lacking in their ease of direct navigation. If filtering through a massive selection of PDFs is too cumbersome, ScienceDaily or Pharmacy Choice might be better websites to visit. Both feature extensive and up-to-date news coverage on the latest in medical and pharmaceutical news but unfortunately lack the use of large, visually appealing graphics and multimedia. The Citizens Commission on Human Rights, being an organization dedicated to the investigation and exposure of human rights violations, is something all-together different. CCHR uses concrete evidence to reveal treatments harmful to patients, and offers healthy and beneficial alternatives. Following a similar field of interest is PsychRights, a law firm targeting these violations in the field of mental health. The site, although drab in its choice of colors and lacking visual quality, contains some very useful information relevant to the mistreatment of the mentally ill in psychiatry today. PsychSearch, a site which indexes case reports of such malpractice, is a very professional, model example of a page which makes proper use of colors and graphics while remaining easily navigable and with fast load times. As previously, all of these websites can be found in my linkroll posted on the right.