The Shrink Network

How this site works

Editorial strategy.

Published July 23, 2026 · Last reviewed July 23, 2026 by Shariq Refai, MD, MBA, FAPA

How The Shrink Network decides what to publish, who reviews it, how sister sites hand off, and how care routing works. Written to be verifiable, not marketed.

Written and reviewed by Shariq Refai, MD, MBA, FAPA

Most health sites publish a lot of pages and hope readers trust them. This site publishes its editorial process so readers, journalists, clinicians, and search engines can see how it works. If a section here doesn't match what's actually on the network, that's a bug. Report it at Corrections.

What this site is.

ShrinkNetwork.com is the front door, navigation system, governance layer, and knowledge-graph map for The Shrink Network. It's a lobby, not a room. It exists to help someone with a mental health question understand the ecosystem and reach the sister site whose one job matches their need. It doesn't sell care. It isn't a competitor to the fourteen sister properties. It doesn't try to rank for every mental health keyword. It succeeds when a visitor lands on the right property, not when they stay here longer.

Who this site is for.

Two audiences. The primary audience is anyone arriving with a mental health question who doesn't yet know which of the network's fourteen properties should answer it. The secondary audience is clinicians, trainees, journalists, and researchers looking for the network's editorial standards, sourcing, and governance. If you're reading this page, you're probably in the second group. Welcome.

What this site owns editorially.

The network map. The directory of properties. Why the network exists as more than one site. Each property's role, purpose, and boundaries. Guided pathways across multiple properties. The knowledge graph and named systems. Network-wide editorial standards. Evidence methodology. Medical-review governance. Disclosures. Corrections. AI-use policy. Crisis and safety routing. Cross-network indexes like the Toolkit Library and Topics index. Machine-readable feeds that let AI answer engines and other sites use the network's structure programmatically.

Everything else is handed off to the sister site whose one job matches. Here's the map.

What this site hands off, and where.

Every network property has one job. When a topic belongs somewhere else, this site links there. The links below use UTM tags for attribution measurement only, no revenue changes hands.

  • Concept definitions hand off to Shrinktionary.
  • Deep concept, symptom, condition, and treatment explanations hand off to Shrinkopedia.
  • Anxiety lived-experience guidance hands off to AnxietyResource.
  • Depression lived-experience guidance hands off to DepressionResource.
  • Research translation and evidence summaries hand off to AnxietyResearch.
  • Medication education hands off to PsychiatryRx.
  • One concept a day hands off to shrinkDaily.
  • Self-guided practice and pattern work hands off to shrinQ.
  • In-the-moment resets and journaling hand off to Unstuck.
  • Attention and phone use hand off to QuitScrolling.
  • The psychiatry profession, careers, ethics, and clinician resources hand off to shrinkiatry.
  • Founder essays, books, and media hand off to shariqrefai.com.
  • Clinical evaluation, medication management, and ongoing psychiatric care hand off to shrinkMD, alongside primary care, insurance-panel therapists, in-network psychiatrists, and 988. See the care-routing framework below for how that handoff actually works.

How a page earns a place here.

No URL enters production until it clears the page-justification gate. That gate is a written record that answers twenty-two specific questions: what the page is, who it's for, what user problem it solves, what search intent it satisfies, why this site should own it instead of a sister site, what unique value it adds beyond what the current top ten results say, what evidence it's built on, what it links to, what links to it, and what the reader's next step is. If any of those questions can't be answered, the page doesn't ship. The template is public at docs/page-justification-template.md.

Reject reasons are equally public. A page doesn't ship just because a keyword has search volume, a competitor has a page, an AI system can generate it, a topic is broadly related to mental health, another network property already covers it, or creating many pages might increase traffic. Every proposed page must have a defined strategic job that this site, and not another network property, is best positioned to own. Full detail is in the site charter.

The evidence standard.

Every substantive medical, psychiatric, pharmacologic, or public-health claim traces to a primary source. Sources are used in a hierarchy: current clinical practice guidelines first, then systematic reviews and meta-analyses, then FDA prescribing information and DailyMed for medication facts, then NIMH, NIH, CDC, SAMHSA, HRSA, FDA, CMS, and state agencies, then peer-reviewed primary research indexed in PubMed, then professional organizations, then authoritative textbooks, then academic medical centers for secondary explanation.

Marketing pages aren't evidence. Unsourced blogs aren't evidence. Competitor content isn't a factual source. AI-generated citations aren't allowed. A single small study doesn't support a broad conclusion. Press releases can't be the sole basis of a medical claim. Every page carries a source list, dated retrieval, and a review date. The full policy is at Evidence methodology.

No page displays a "medically reviewed" statement unless a qualified reviewer, in practice Shariq Refai, MD, MBA, FAPA, has actually reviewed it. Reviewed dates aren't marketing. They're a record.

How care routing works.

When a page suggests that someone talk with a clinician, it presents care as a menu, not a funnel. Care isn't one thing. It's at least five. What follows is the framework every page on this site uses, and what sister sites are asked to adopt when they route their readers toward care.

Care-routing framework

When evaluation may help, care can look like one of five things.

Choose what fits your situation, your insurance, and your access. There's no single right answer, and there's no requirement to start with a psychiatrist.

  1. Your primary care doctor.

    The entry point most people already have. Many primary care doctors evaluate and treat common anxiety and depression, and they can refer if a specialist is needed. If you have a PCP, this is often the fastest first conversation.

  2. A therapist through Psychology Today or your insurance panel.

    For talk therapy, evidence-based approaches like CBT, ACT, DBT, or EMDR are widely available. Psychology Today's directory is the largest in the US and lets you filter by insurance, specialty, and location. Your insurance panel is the other efficient route.

  3. A psychiatrist for prescribing and complex care.

    If you need medication management, have a complex history, or aren't responding to the first line of treatment, a psychiatrist is often the right fit. Wait times for in-network psychiatrists in the US are often long, sometimes months. That's a real access barrier and part of why telepsychiatry exists.

  4. shrinkMD, one telepsychiatry option.

    shrinkMD is the network's independent telepsychiatry practice, board-certified, currently accepting adult patients in a limited set of US states. It's transparently one option among many, not a recommendation above other qualified clinicians.

  5. 988 for crisis. This is a different moment.

    If you're thinking about suicide, in acute crisis, or someone you love is in danger right now, this isn't a "find a psychiatrist" moment. Call or text 988 in the US to reach the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline, available 24 hours a day. Call 911 if someone is in immediate danger.

Full disclosure. The Shrink Network is founded by Shariq Refai, MD, who also owns shrinkMD. This site takes no referral fee, no affiliate commission, and no revenue for care sent to shrinkMD or any other clinician named on this page. We name shrinkMD because it's transparently one option, not because we recommend it above other qualified clinicians. Naming the alternatives is a requirement of the network's editorial standard, not a courtesy. Read the full disclosures.

Independence.

Every network site is independent. Each has its own editorial leadership, its own scope, and its own URL. The Shrink Network coordinates the standards, the cross-site linking, and the network-wide infrastructure, so wherever you arrive in the network, the path to the next useful page is short.

ShrinkNetwork.com specifically sells nothing. It runs no advertising. It takes no affiliate revenue. It earns nothing when a reader clicks through to a sister site or to shrinkMD. The founder's financial interest in shrinkMD, in the app Unstuck, and in his books is disclosed on the disclosures page and referenced in the footer of every page. Cross-network clicks are UTM-tagged for attribution measurement only, not for revenue attribution.

The machine-readable spine.

To make the network programmatically legible to search engines, AI answer engines, and other sites, we publish structured feeds. Each is versioned, dated, and updated on the same quarterly cadence as the editorial pages.

  • /network.json, the registry of every property with its role and URL.
  • /network-governance.json, per-property governance: commercial status, clinical status, editorial status, required disclosures, crisis-language requirements, and shrinkMD relationship.
  • /index.json, every indexable page on this site with kind, concept IDs, audience, and dates.
  • /topics.json, per-topic canonical entries across the network.
  • /downloads.json, every downloadable Toolkit resource with topic IDs and canonical concepts.
  • /sitemap.xml, all indexable URLs with last-modified dates.
  • /llms.txt and /llms-full.txt, discovery files for large language models.
  • /robots.txt, crawl rules, including the network policy that welcomes AI crawlers to read, index, and cite the site with attribution. See the AI and citation policy.

Governance.

The rules behind every recognition program, directory, contributor system, referral relationship, sponsored placement, and research report on any network property are codified at Network governance. Sister sites must comply before launching anything in those categories. The rules cover:

Clinicians, researchers, and qualified educators can contribute at Contribute. Every contributor is credentialed, every reviewer is real, every byline is permanent, and there is never a fee.

How this page gets enforced.

Everything above is auditable. Seven scripts run every quarter and on every deploy: audit:network, audit:shrinktionary, audit:shrinkiatry, audit:shrinkmd, audit:registry, audit:toolkit, and check:drift. Together they verify that every outbound link resolves, every peer URL is sitemap-exact, the shrinkMD inbound-link contract holds, the network governance file matches what sister sites actually publish, and glossary drift is falling over time. A scheduled task fires the whole chain quarterly and again in mid-November for year-end regulatory changes. The runbook is at docs/quarterly-site-review.md.

Reporting a problem.

If a claim on any network site is wrong, out of date, or missing a source, tell us. Corrections are logged publicly, dated, and cross-referenced from the page they change. Report at Corrections. If a link is broken, an audit already flagged it and it's on the quarterly fix list, but you can accelerate it by telling us.

Governance references.