Psychology information and websites providing information about many psychological issues abound on the Internet. In many ways, this is a positive thing because the web may be the first step an individual suffering from problems or with friends and family who have problems takes to understand what is happening and find out what can be done to help. However, while there are many good and reliable web sites, there are also many that are not so good that may provide misleading information to readers or have other problems. In order to get a general idea about what a quality psychology website is or is not, two websites were examined, the National Institute for Mental Health’s pages and PsychEducation’s pages.
The first website visited was the National Institute of Mental Health on February 19, 2013 (http://www.nimh.nih.gov/index.shtml). According to the website, “he National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) is part of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), a component of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.” Therefore, it is easy to realize that the sponsor of this website is a specific part of the United States government. The “.gov” at the end of the URL signifies to viewers that NIMH’s website is truly a government website. NIMH’s website does not appear to carry any particular bias except that it tries to promote the importance of understanding, studying, and offering accurate information on mental health issues.
The first impression of this site is that its format is simple, clean, and uncluttered. The use of drop-down menus under the banner image for menus such as “Health & Education,” “Outreach,” “Research and Funding,” “News,” and “About NIMH” are part of what keep the page from being cluttered and easy to navigate. Also on the page is a section called “Mental Health Information” which provides links to information about several psychological problems that people may be interested in, such as anxiety disorders, autism, depression, eating disorders, suicide prevention, and others. A text entry field to search the website is also provided at the top of the page. Testing the search tool with the term “substance abuse” led to a long list of NIMH articles pertaining to that topic, although the first link led to a page specifically about substance abuse in schizophrenics, which may not be what most people are searching for. However, in general, information of all kinds regarding mental health and psychology issues is easily findable.
The second website visited was PsychEducation on February 19, 2013 (http://www.psycheducation.org/). According to this website, it is created by James R. Phelps, M.D., a board-certified psychiatrist who works at Samaritan Health Services in Corvallis, Oregon. In the section on “Who is this Dr. Phelps?” Phelps writes briefly about his own therapy experiences, concluding with “I'm sure all this "therapy" has helped me avoid having to go back on Prozac or something like it again.” Additionally, he reveals in the section “How is this website funded?” that he accepts pharmaceutical company money for the purpose of creating this website as a way to educate people about mental health issues, especially bipolar disorder.
The first impression of the PsychEducation website is that it is difficult to look at because of its unattractive design. Much of the information on the site appears to focus on Bipolar Disorder. For information that deals with other issues, there is a link to a list of “Useful Internet Resources.”Many of the links on the page are broken, and there is only one link to a government website rather than personal websites. A big problem with this page is that much of it is text-based, and it can be overwhelming to read through a lot of text when searching for specific information.
It is not that there is nothing to learn from the PsychEducation website, but the information is badly presented. A good part of the website is that it offers a link to “Med's (sic) for low income folks.” Parts that were not very good were the text-heavy sections of information broken links to resources signifying that the page is not updated frequently or at least checked, and an apparent bias toward self-diagnosis. Although the author of this page is a psychiatrist who has no compunction about accepting pharmaceutical funding to support his personal psychology website, his statement, “I'm sure all this "therapy" has helped me avoid having to go back on Prozac or something like it again” makes it sound as if therapy and medications for psychiatric disorders are undesirable things. There is little emphasis on consulting a professional or how to consult a professional.
Works Cited
Beck, Susan. The Good, The Bad, & The Ugly or, Why It’s a Good Idea to Evaluate Web Sources: Evaluation Criteria. New Mexico State University Library, 27 Apr. 2009. Web.
Henderson, John R. A Guide to Critical Thinking About What You See on the Web: Thinking. Ithaca College Library, 4 Jan. 2011. Web.
National Institute for Mental Health, n.d. Web. Accessed 19 Feb. 2013. http://www.nimh.nih.gov/index.shtml
Phelps, Jim. PsychEducation.org: 300 pages on complex mood and anxiety problems. PsychEducation.org, n.d. Accessed 19 Feb. 2013.
