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.

Mental Links: A Guide to the Authorities on Mental Health

My endeavor in writing this blog is to not only spark a discussion within the web about literature and mental health, but also to be a conduct toward valid and accurate information about these subjects. Towards that end, I felt it necessary to search the web and provide a number of sources that individuals can turn to for their own research on mental health. I kept in mind the Webby Awards Criteria while evaluating the usefulness and utility of these sites, but most of all, with most of my resources being based in the academic field of mental health, I strove to make sure the information on the sites held enough authority to be referenced. The American Psychiatric Association is one such website. It serves as a member driven locale and a networking hub for psychiatrists and members of the association. It’s news feed is current and informative, and many useful links to education and career based resources in psychiatry can be found here. Unfortunately, the American Psychiatric Association lacks the visual appeal and navigational ease of the American Psychological Association, which is the Washington DC based organization which represents psychology in the United States. It has a very strong infrastructure and uses intriguing, relevant and interesting graphics to the utmost effectiveness. This site’s navigational tool system makes the navigation of a seemingly overwhelming amount of content easy on the user, something that Psychnet-Uk lacks. This is unfortunate, because although Psychnet-Uk lacks the visual appeal and ease of perusal of the American Psychological Association, it is an invaluable web directory of everything mental health. A directory which will inevitably lead you to Mayoclinic: a not-for-profit medical organization committed to the diagnosis and treatment of virtually all varieties of complex illness. Mayoclinic is not only a resource of high authority, it’s an experience. Navigation through any range of diseases, drugs, treatments and more can be pulled up immediately through their easy-to-use site map. They have podcasts and blogs which are updated daily coupled with captivating visual media such as slideshows and videos, all informative and on topics relative to health. Another incredible data resource is the National Alliance on Mental Illness. This site’s “Inform Yourself” section has the authority of a legion of professionals, yet communicates the complexities of mental disorders and medication in a way that is not only enlightening, but easy to understand and directed towards the general public. These sections also suggest relevant and authority-driven medical journals for further information. For a similarly informative and easily comprehensible experience on schizophrenia and depression in particular I would recommend exploring NARSAD, a charity for their research. NARSAD keeps its web-based data concise, and offers a general overview of these conditions while offering ways for the general public to help through charity. Unfortunately, NARSAD lacks in that its news feed hasn’t been updated in several months. A weakness that the National Institute of Mental health does not fall prone to. Less is more for the NIMH website. Although there are few graphics, the site retains its visual appeal and the abundance of insightful data in the “Mental Health Topics” section is executed in a way that keeps pages dynamic and the user interacting with the site. Its news section is a current resource which not only covers information relative to the National Institute, but also to press releases and current news in the field of mental health. Although the site is fairly easy to browse, no site in this linkroll compares to the ease of the Navigation found at the National Mental Health Association. The perusal of mental health related information at this site can be searched for alphabetically “by issue”, “by audience”, or by “disorders and treatments”. Everything is organized in scroll boxes, keeping page scrolling to a minimum and facilitating the research process. Even though the National Mental Health Association’s site is well-engineered, it has less than engaging visuals, something WebMD has in abundance. For a health-related resource, WebMD is the ultimate visual experience. Its images are eye-catching, provocative, and displayed in a dynamic slide-show format which keeps the page fresh. It’s “latest headlines” section makes it easy to keep up to date on current WebMD news and you can navigate nearly their entire site effortlessly from the homepage without needing to dig deep into site-maps. It even has a list of top 12 health topics for easy navigation. Recognized by several professionals and reviewers as a credible and in-depth resource, WebMD holds the most professional, well-developed and well-designed site in my link roll. Due to my emphasis in this blog being upon Mental health in literature, I thought it necessary to add at least one link to a writing resource I find invaluable: Writing.com. Writing.com offers information on everything about writing, from self-publishing to copyrights. It’s focus, however, is not as a resource of information, but rather as a member driven, interactive atmosphere. The site’s main function is as a forum in which writers can post their work on the site and get quality feedback from interested readers. Aesthetically, however, Writing.com is lacking. The home page is unwelcoming to new guests, featuring little in the way of captivating material, with little to garner the attention of the guest aside from the registration form, which is untactfully placed front and center. If you can overlook this one minor flaw, however, and dig deeper into the site, I believe you will be pleasantly surprised. If you wish to access any of these resources quickly and easily for your own personal use, feel free to use the linkroll found on the right of my blog page.