Psych Central is an independent mental health social network. Psych Central is overseen by mental health professionals who create and oversee all the content published on the site. The site was created in 1995. The site was named as one of the Internet's 50 Best Websites in 2008 by Time Magazine, and has approximately 3.7 million unique visitors per month.
Maps, Directions, and Place Reviews
Features
This psychiatric website has over 230 support groups spread out over two communities: Psych Central Forums and a neurological support community, NeuroTalk. The combined membership of these two communities is over 383,000 members. Consumers are Psych Central's target audience but the site also includes a section for professionals.
Psych Central hosts two advice services on its website:
- "Ask the Therapist" is a team of licensed, credential therapists who have responded to over 5,800 questions.
- Similar to Medhelp.org, "Psych Central Answers" has allowed other users to answer another 8,400 questions.
Psych Central has over 100 blogs that are written by psychologists, psychiatrists and consumers, as well as a mental health news bureau that publishes up to five stories per day. One of the more prominent blogs is devoted to celebrity mental health issues.
The site also has a large collection of mental health and psychology articles from sources ranging from the National Institute of Mental Health to the Hospice Foundation and a page entitled the Mental Health and Psychology Resources Online listing hundreds of mental health Web sites.
Other features include dozens of tests and screening measures, including an Attention Deficit Disorder (ADHD), mania and obsessive-compulsive disorder test and a Narcissistic Personality Quiz.
History
Psych Central was founded by John Grohol in 1991. Grohol was a Florida psychology graduate student who began answering mental health questions in numerous mental health Usenet newsgroups, which he turned to after losing a friend to suicide. In 1995, Grohol began a weekly online mental health chat which continued on the Psych Central website. Grohol stated that one of the reasons he founded Psych Central was because he lost his childhood best friend to untreated depression.
Luka Rocco Magnotta who was accused of killing and dismembering a student had earlier "ranted and railed" against his mother in a 1,200 word posted on the site.
In 2011, the journal Pediatrics was criticized by Psych Central for publishing a paper on "Facebook depression," which Psych Central called a "made-up term for a phenomenon that doesn't exist."
In 2009 a study published in the Journal of Neuroscience suggested that marijuana could potentially provide relief from the symptoms of PTSD. The research was reviewed by Psych Central.
Evaluation and criticism
The journal Health and Social Work ran an analysis on the quality of online health-related information regarding schizophrenia. WebMD scored the highest with a 91 percent endorsement. MedicineNet.com had an 89 percent endorsement rate, and Psych Central's section called "Schizophrenia and Psychosis" (http://psychcentral.com/disorders) had an 88 percent endorsement rate. The journal concluded that all sites examined offered quality information on schizophrenia.
The journal Cyberpsychology, Behavior, and Social Networking ran an analysis on the quality of online mental health-related information across the 11 most commonly-searched for mental disorders. The researchers found that search engines "regularly returned Web sites that were of good or better quality health information." Psych Central was cited as one of the top two mental health-focused Web sites returning search results for this analysis.
In 2001 the Los Angeles Times cautioned that Psych Central "...is as much a vehicle for self-promotion as it is a consumer guide. [Grohol] advertises his book...He spends less energy doing evaluations of outside resources."
Source of the article : Wikipedia
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