‘Online Mental Health’ at Psychology, Philosophy and Real Life, Page 5

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!

Many thanks to Dr Gareth Furber, the creator of PsychSplash, for giving our new free blogging service a ’splash’ over at his site. Dr Furber highlighted the new site’s features and advertising model and commented on the potential of BlogsInMind.com as a journaling and therapeutic writing tool.