If you're reading mental-health content on the internet, you should know how it got written, who wrote it, and what they will and won't say. Here's ours.
Who writes here
Every post on psychiatry.help is bylined to a licensed mental-health clinician with active clinical practice. Contributors come from a mix of outpatient practices, hospital systems, inpatient psychiatry, sleep medicine, addiction medicine, and integrated primary care. That combined real-world experience is what posts are written from. We're actively adding contributors from outside Oregon and Washington to broaden the perspectives represented here.
Current contributors include:
- Dr. Ragnar Scott, DNP, PMHNP-BC. Board-certified Psychiatric Mental Health Nurse Practitioner. Combined outpatient and hospital practice. Clinical focus on men's mental health: ADHD, depression, anxiety, addiction, PTSD, hormonal health, and sleep. Licensed in Oregon and Washington.
- Kelly Sue Bracken, PMHNP. Psychiatric Mental Health Nurse Practitioner with inpatient and outpatient experience across multiple care settings. Licensed in Oregon and Washington.
- Alberto Logan Benitez, LMFT. Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist with hospital-based and outpatient practice experience. Focus on relationship work, family systems, and couples therapy. Licensed in Georgia, Washington, and Oregon.
- John Christian Johnson, PMHNP. Psychiatric Mental Health Nurse Practitioner with combined psychiatry and sleep medicine practice. Licensed in Oregon, Washington, and Texas.
Every post is bylined. We don't publish anonymous content. We don't have a marketing team writing under clinical names. The named clinician on a post is the person responsible for what's on the page.
If you're a licensed mental-health clinician with active practice and want to write here, see Contribute. We publish guest writing from clinicians who can stand behind their byline. The same editorial standards apply, sponsored or ghostwritten work isn't accepted.
How content gets reviewed
Posts about medications, treatments, conditions, and men's health get a clinical review pass before publishing. The reviewer is one of the clinicians named above (not always the original author). The review date sits in the page's structured data as lastReviewed, search engines and AI tools can pull it directly. When we update a post substantively, we update that date.
Off-script posts (the opinion and editorial work) don't get clinical review the same way. Those are voice pieces. The author's name is on them. The clinical content stays accurate, but the take is theirs.
What we cite
Where we make claims about how medications work, what evidence supports a treatment, or what diagnostic criteria look like, we cite real sources. Priority order:
- Systematic reviews. Cochrane first. PRISMA-flagged reviews second.
- Practice guidelines from professional bodies (APA, AACAP, AAFP, ASAM).
- FDA labels and regulatory documents.
- Major RCTs in NEJM, JAMA, Lancet, BMJ where no systematic review exists yet.
- Diagnostic source documents (DSM-5-TR, ICD-11).
We don't cite primary studies cherry-picked from low-tier journals. We don't cite industry-funded research without naming the funder. We don't cite influencers, podcasts, or news headlines as evidence.
Citations land in a footer block at the bottom of medical posts so you can scan them quickly without breaking up the reading.
What our voice is
We write the way clinicians actually talk with patients, not the way pharma marketing talks to consumers. If a clinical concept has a normal-English version, we use the normal-English version. If a topic genuinely requires a technical term (Schedule II controlled substance, pharmacokinetics, NMDA receptor), we use it and explain it.
We share clinical opinions. Where the evidence is contested, we say so. Where we disagree with a popular position, we explain why. We don't pretend to be neutral when we're not.
What we won't write about
A few firm lines:
- Specific medical advice for a person we haven't seen. We can describe how medications work, what a condition looks like, what a treatment course usually involves. We won't tell a reader what to take or what to do without an actual evaluation.
- Diagnoses based on reader-submitted symptoms. Same reason. Self-diagnosis from a website is the start of a conversation, not the end of one.
- Anything we don't actually practice. If a topic is outside our clinical work (geriatric dementia care, forensic psychiatry, perinatal psychiatry), we either don't write about it, or we clearly mark when we're describing the area rather than practicing in it.
- Promotional content for pharma, supplement companies, or third-party services. Nothing on this site is sponsored or paid placement. If we recommend a specific tool, it's because we actually use it.
Corrections policy
If we got something wrong, we want to know. Use the editorial contact form with the post URL and what's off. We update the post, note the correction in the page's modified date, and re-trigger clinical review for affected medical content.
We don't silently delete or rewrite history. If we change a substantive position, the post says so.
Privacy
We don't ask for personal medical information through the site. When comments and discussion features launch, they will be moderated by a clinician, and anything that reads as a clinical question about a specific person will be removed or redirected. This isn't a place to publicly post your symptoms. We don't track readers beyond standard server logs and analytics, and we don't sell data.
The patient inquiry form collects only what's needed to connect you with a clinician, and that information goes to our clinic and stays there. The editorial contact form goes to our editorial inbox for corrections, questions, and press.
Read the medical disclaimer
The legal version of "this is not medical advice" is at /medical-disclaimer/. Read it once. The short version: nothing here replaces talking to a real clinician about your actual situation.