Editorial team

Shrinkopedia is written by writers and medically reviewed by a psychiatrist. This page explains who's behind the content and how that work is split.

Medical review

Shariq Refai, MD, MBA

Medical editor and lead reviewer

Dr. Refai leads the Shrinkopedia editorial team and medically reviews the content. Dr. Refai is a psychiatrist with dual board certification. He is certified by the American Board of Psychiatry and Neurology, and by the American Board of Sports and Performance Psychiatry. He is the founder of shrinkMD, an independent multistate telepsychiatry practice that provides adult outpatient psychiatric care, including evaluations, diagnosis, medication management, and continuity of care. He holds an MBA from Duke University. His medical training includes St. George's University School of Medicine, with residency training at the University of Hawaii and John Peter Smith Hospital.

He is the author of two mental health books written for a general audience, "Your Mind Is Full of Sh*t" and "The Havoc in Your Head," both focused on overthinking, anxiety, and panic. He is also the creator of the Unstuck app, a self-guided wellness tool, and the founder of shrinkMD Publishing.

His ORCID iD is 0009-0009-1090-4373.

Dr. Refai's work centers on anxiety, overthinking, panic, and public mental health education, and on explaining psychiatry in plain language without sensationalism. On Shrinkopedia, his role is medical review: he checks entries for clinical accuracy.

How the editorial team works

Shrinkopedia uses a simple two-part model.

Writers research each topic from primary sources and draft the entry in plain language. Their job is to make a topic clear and accurate for a reader who may be reading it on a hard day.

A medical reviewer then checks every page for clinical accuracy before it's published. The reviewer can revise claims, add nuance, or cut anything that oversimplifies. No entry goes live until it has been through that review.

This split is deliberate. Writing for clarity and checking for clinical accuracy are different skills, and keeping them separate means a page has to satisfy both.

Every published entry names its review panel and shows when it was reviewed, so you always know who checked it and when. You can read more about the process on the How Shrinkopedia builds content page.

A note on scope

Shrinkopedia is part of The Shrink Network, a family of mental health resources. Dr. Refai's clinical practice, shrinkMD, is a separate entity. Reviewing Shrinkopedia is editorial work, not clinical care. Reading an entry he has reviewed doesn't make him your doctor, and Shrinkopedia isn't a substitute for seeing one.