In crisis or thinking about suicide? Call or text 988 in the US for the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline, available 24 hours a day. If someone is in immediate danger, call 911.

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Editorial strategy

How Shrinkopedia decides what to publish.

What this site publishes, what it does not publish, what belongs elsewhere in The Shrink Network, and how care routing stays editorial. Published because a standard is only a standard if you can check it.

Reviewed by Shariq Refai, MD, MBA. Last reviewed July 20, 2026.

What Shrinkopedia is

Shrinkopedia is the mental-health encyclopedia layer of The Shrink Network. It exists to be the deep, plain-language reference a person turns to when they want to understand a concept, symptom, condition, or treatment completely rather than at definition-length. It is not a lead-generation site. It earns durable authority so that when it does route a reader toward care, the recommendation reads as editorial, not as advertising.

Who Shrinkopedia is for

Adults in the United States who are actively researching a mental-health topic. That includes people researching their own experience, family members researching for someone they care about, and clinicians, medical students, and trainees using it as a plain-language refresher or a resource to share with patients. Shrinkopedia is written to be understandable to a general adult reader without dumbing the content down.

What Shrinkopedia owns editorially

What Shrinkopedia does not own

Every network property has one job. Shrinkopedia respects that by not publishing the following, and by handing readers off to the property that does own each of them:

How a page earns a place on Shrinkopedia

Every proposed page passes a written justification before it enters production. The document asks what user question the page answers, what search intent it serves, which cornerstone or hub it supports, what unique value it provides beyond the current search results, why Shrinkopedia rather than another network property should own it, and what would make an existing page or a sister-site page better placed to serve the same reader. If the answer is that another property is a better fit, the page is not built here.

New content is not created because a keyword has volume, a competitor has a page, an AI system can generate one, a topic is broadly related to mental health, or creating many pages appears likely to increase traffic. Every page has a defined job or it does not get published.

Evidence standard

Every clinical claim must trace to primary literature. In approximate order of preference:

  1. Current clinical practice guidelines.
  2. Systematic reviews and meta-analyses.
  3. FDA prescribing information and DailyMed for medication facts.
  4. Public-health sources such as NIMH, NIH, CDC, SAMHSA, and FDA.
  5. Peer-reviewed primary research indexed in PubMed.
  6. Major professional organizations.
  7. Authoritative textbooks when appropriate.
  8. High-quality academic medical centers for accessible secondary explanation.

Shrinkopedia does not use marketing pages as clinical evidence, does not use competitor content as a factual source, does not use AI-generated citations, and does not publish studies that cannot be verified. Every substantive entry carries a source list, publication and last-reviewed dates, uncertainty language where the evidence is mixed, and an honest "what remains uncertain" section. Read how we review evidence for the full methodology.

Care routing

Every condition entry ends with a section called "When evaluation may help" that names five options in editorial order: a primary care doctor, a therapist through Psychology Today or an insurance panel, a psychiatrist, shrinkMD as a disclosed telepsychiatry option, and 988 for crisis. shrinkMD is one of five. The founder relationship between Dr. Refai, shrinkMD, and Shrinkopedia is disclosed inline every time shrinkMD is named as a care option. Shrinkopedia takes no referral or affiliate commission for care. The site names shrinkMD because it is transparently one option, not because it is objectively best.

Independence

Shrinkopedia is published by shrinkMD Publishing. It runs no advertising, sells no reader data, takes no referral or affiliate revenue of any kind, and has no sponsored entries or native advertising in the editorial content. When an entry mentions shrinkMD as a care option, it is because shrinkMD is one valid telepsychiatry option for the conditions the entry covers, and the entry says so alongside the other qualified options.

Machine-readable spine

Every canonical concept on Shrinkopedia references the concept ID spine at shrinktionary.com/concepts.json. Shrinkopedia publishes its own registry at /index.json, so any sister site, search engine, or AI assistant can build a map of what Shrinkopedia covers without scraping. Every downloadable asset is listed at /downloads.json. AI answer engines have specific discoverability files at /llms.txt and /llms-full.txt. The network standard this site follows is documented at shrinknetwork.com/editorial-standards.

Refresh and review

Every entry carries a Published date, a Medically reviewed date, a Sources checked date, and a Last updated date. Every quarter, every entry is reviewed for accuracy against current sources. The Sources-checked date is bumped when the sources still hold, whether or not the content changed. When something material changes, the Medically-reviewed date is bumped and the change is noted in the revision history for that entry. The runbook that governs this process lives in the site source at docs/quarterly-site-review.md.

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