‘Online Mental Health’ at Psychology, Philosophy and Real Life, Page 4

Last year, I described my experiences trying to renew the digital certificate which enables this site to process data securely. Having battled with a company called RegisterFly, I wound up having a very pleasant experience with GoDaddy. Now a colleague who works in clinical trials has passed on news that the company I battled with was so bad it has actually been stripped of its ICANN accreditation. Caveat emptor!

We hadn’t even announced it yet, but by last Friday afternoon astute readers were already signing up for our brand new newsletter! Just choose the topics you’d like to hear about, and we’ll package it all up into one newsletter and deliver it straight to you either once a day, or once a week. If you’d like to stay connected, what could be easier?

One year after the original BrainTalk Communities disappeared from the web, the domain BrainTalk.org was sold at auction yesterday for $2200. Although rights to the domain could have been retained for less than $10 — or even sold to raise money for the group — it was instead left to expire by the same folks who still hold the keys to the now-inaccessible database containing over 1 million contributions by the nearly 50,000 members of the original support group for sufferers of neurological disorders.

The American Medical Association decided this week not to press ahead with a recommendation to the American Psychiatric Association that video game addiction be labelled as a formal mental health disorder in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. The association also decided against urging parents to limit children to a total of two hours per day of playing video games, watching television and surfing the Internet.

Too many people have had to wait too long to access our online counselling services — with our waiting list stretching out to 7 weeks recently. Today, we welcome our first Associate Online Counsellor, Sarah Hayes, whose practice is now featured in our online counselling service section. Welcome, Sarah, and we hope this will mean fewer people having to wait for the services they want!