Common questions
Questions people ask
Why not put everything on shrinkMD?
Clinical care, education, and self-guided tools shouldn't live in the same place. Keeping them apart protects you. An education page is never quietly trying to move you into treatment, and a tool isn't pretending to be a doctor. When you want care, you can go to shrinkMD on purpose, not because a blog post nudged you there.
Who reviews the content?
Every educational page in the network names its medical reviewer and shows the date it was last reviewed. The reviewer is Shariq Refai, MD, MBA, a board-certified psychiatrist. The full review process is on the Medical review board and Editorial standards pages.
Why are some sites .com and some .org?
The .org sites, AnxietyResource, DepressionResource, AnxietyResearch, and PsychiatryRx, are independent editorial publications about a single topic. The .com sites are products, platforms, or broader editorial properties: shrinkMD provides clinical care, shrinQ is a program, Shrinkopedia is the encyclopedia, shrinkDaily is the daily editorial habit. It's a small distinction, but it's deliberate.
Is this all one company?
The Shrink Network is a group of independent properties, all created or medically reviewed by Dr. Refai. They link to one another openly because they belong to the same network, but they're not the same entity. shrinkMD is its own clinical practice. The educational sites are editorial publications. shrinQ and Unstuck are tools. Each is run with its own purpose.
How is the network funded?
Each property has its own model. shrinkMD is a telepsychiatry practice with patients. shrinQ is a paid program. Unstuck and QuitScrolling are apps. The educational sites carry no advertising, take no affiliate or referral commissions, and don't sell visitor data. ShrinkNetwork.com itself sells nothing. The financial-interest disclosure in the footer explains the relationships plainly.
How to find the right one.
If you're not sure where to start, the homepage at shrinknetwork.com has a short guide. Or you can start where you already are: a question becomes a search, a search leads to a Shrinkopedia entry, and that entry points you to the right next step in the network.
Where to start
If you're not sure, start here
The thinking behind it
Why I didn't build one giant site.
The default for a clinician building a mental health site is to build one big site that covers everything. I considered that. I rejected it. There are three reasons.
First, audiences don't overlap as much as it looks. The person searching for "what does anhedonia feel like" doesn't want to land on a medication reference. The person trying to understand their SSRI doesn't want to wade through a symptom encyclopedia to find the section that's actually about their question. The person looking for telepsychiatry care wants to evaluate a clinical service, not read an educational article. Trying to serve all of those audiences on a single site usually means each audience finds what they need slightly harder than they should.
Second, editorial focus matters. A medication site that's also an encyclopedia of conditions is worse at both. A telepsychiatry practice that's also an educational reference is worse at both. Building each property with a clear scope means each one can be best in class at the thing it does, and the network gets the benefit of all of them rather than the compromise of one.
Third, the network effect compounds. Each new property in the network adds value to every existing property because they all reinforce each other. A directory of mental health sites is a directory. A network of mental health sites that share editorial standards, share a taxonomy, share the cross site components on every entry, and route users to each other intelligently is something different. That's the moat. One site can't be a moat.
Why "Shrink."
The word "shrink" has been used informally for mental health professionals since at least the 1960s, originally as slang derived from "headshrinker." It carries a layer of cultural baggage I'm aware of. Some of the connotations are dated. Some are dismissive. The word also happens to be the most recognizable, most accessible name for what a psychiatrist actually is in the lived language of patients.
I picked "shrink" for the network on purpose. Mental health language is intimidating enough already. The clinical vocabulary is precise but unwelcoming. The marketing vocabulary in the wellness space is welcoming but often unclear or wrong. "Shrink" sits in between. It's how people actually talk about going to a psychiatrist. Using it as the network's brand makes the whole thing feel less stiff and more honest about what it is.
The naming choice also has practical strategic value. "Shrink" as a brand stem lets every site in the network share an obvious family resemblance (Shrinkopedia, shrinkMD, shrinQ, shrinkiatry) while still standing on its own as a distinct property. The network is named for the connective tissue, not for any one of its parts.
Why this is an ecosystem, not a media company.
A media company publishes content for advertising revenue. A wellness brand sells a course or a subscription. A telehealth startup sells the visit. The Shrink Network does some of those things (shrinkMD sells the visit) but the network itself isn't structured for any of them.
The network is structured to be the underlying mental health knowledge infrastructure that the internet doesn't yet have. It's an ecosystem because that's the right structure for the problem. The editorial sites are free at the point of access, carry no advertising, sell no user data, take no affiliate revenue. The standards are transparent. The clinical review is named. The corrections are public. The whole thing is built to be the place you go when you want trustworthy mental health information that respects you enough to use the actual clinical concepts in language you can read.
What we're building toward.
The Shrink Network is in active build. Right now it has seven editorial properties at meaningful scale (Shrinkopedia, AnxietyResource, DepressionResource, PsychiatryRx, AnxietyResearch, Shrinktionary, shrinkDaily) plus three application properties (shrinQ, Unstuck, QuitScrolling) plus the care layer (shrinkMD) plus the profession layer (shariqrefai.com, shrinkiatry). All thirteen are independent. All thirteen carry the network's editorial standards. The structural infrastructure (Compass, Knowledge Path, Trust Block, cross cluster links, network clusters) is built out on the four core editorial sites and gets added to the smaller sites in scheduled passes.
The goal isn't to be the biggest mental health resource. The goal is to be the one that respects the reader enough to use real clinical concepts in real language, that's named and accountable, that connects rather than fragments, and that treats mental health information the way clinicians treat clinical knowledge. That's the network the internet doesn't yet have. That's the network we're building.
Related reading: the Network Map, the Knowledge Graph, and more about the network and me.
Questions or feedback: [email protected].