Psych Central: Reflections & Gratitude After 25 Years

Long before Google, Facebook, Twitter, and even WebMD, Psych Central began its life in 1995 as a side project I created to highlight great mental health resources online at the time. Over its 25-year lifespan, we’ve gone from a dozen simple pages to tens of thousands of referenced articles. After 25 years, it’s time to reflect on Psych Central’s past, present, and the future yet to come. If you’re not familiar with the background on the inspiration for founding Psych Central, you may want to check it out. (You can also read this interview with me about 25 years of Psych Central.) The Past I began Psych Central as my personal web page back in early 1995 to house the resources I was curating at the time. These were indexes of all of the mental health and psychology resources online at the time, mostly online support groups for things like depression, personality concerns, and anxiety. There were very few mental health and psychology web pages to link to. Instead most of the stuff was still locked away in mailing lists, newsgroups, and gopher sites. I envisioned a specialized version of Yahoo, which was a general directory of all of the best online resources at the time. Like Yahoo, my resources were collected and reviewed by a human (me!). If I didn’t think the resource added much to a person’s understanding of the disorder or psychological concept, I didn’t link to it. That first version of my personal website got me my first job, wor...
Source: World of Psychology - Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Tags: General Mental Health and Wellness Psychology Anniversary best of psych central Source Type: blogs