eTherapy Essays

eTherapy Essays

The Best Practices in e-Therapy series of articles was spurred by the need to start moving the field ahead in this area and start defining what we mean by these nebulous terms. Comments to these articles should be directed to one of the International Society for Mental Health Online mailing lists.

"e-Therapy" is a term I quoted in 1997 to describe using an Internet-mediated technology to foster a helping relationship online.

Best Practices in e-therapy series:

• Definition & Scope of e-therapy
  May 14, 1999
  
  
• Confidentiality & Privacy
  April 8, 1999
  
  
• Legal & Licensing Issues
  October 31, 1999
  
  
• Clarifying the Definition
  May 2, 2001
  
  
• The Difference Between Security and Being Secure
  October, 2004
  
  

Dr. John Grohol's Psych Central started out as a concept in the fall of 1994, after the World Wide Web looked as though it were here to stay. I had been compiling indices (what I called "pointers") to information online since 1991. These began as a list of mental health, psychology and psychiatry-related newsgroups online because, at the time, there was no easy way to obtain such a listing. It made it much easier to find a relevant newsgroup and join it.

An index of mailing lists followed shortly thereafter, which was posted to a number of newsgroups. Then followed the inevitable Web pointer. Since not everyone subscribed to newsgroups and I wanted to disseminate the information either further, I decided to put these pointers on the Web. Launched in January, 1995, Psych Central: John Grohol's Mental Health Page has been a hit from the beginning. Within the first 3 months, it received Point's prestigious Top 5% of the Web award, as well as a fair amount of media attention in the ensuing years. Consistently rated as one of the top 10 mental health resources online, it is updated more often and more reliably than others. Regularly maintained by John and an assistant, it is one of the Net's best annotated guides to the most useful Websites, newsgroups, and mailing lists online today in mental health, psychology, social work, and psychiatry. It receives between three and four thousand visitors per day and acts as a reliable and accurate source of mental health information for the over twenty million visitors which have stopped by since it was first introduced. All proceeds from monies collected from this Website as an Amazon.com affiliate or from advertising are reinvested directly into the Website. Any extra monies are donated to the National Parkinson Foundation. That makes this a nonprofit Website, although I know I'll never get around to filing for official IRS recognition... Hey, who needs official recognition from them anyways? :-)