Start Your Own Blog Here Today (and become famous! - sort of)
We believe that Web Logs (Blogs, for short) that are focused on or
around schizophrenia are a great way to allow people to share experiences
and information on schizophrenia, and to ultimately get better public
understanding and treatment for people with schizophrenia.
Please email us at szwebmaster@yahoo.com
if you'd like to start a blog! Send us details on what you'd like to
write on (what area or aspect of schizophrenia, and a little about your
background). You'll get instant access to the 100,000+ monthly schizophrenia.com
web site visitors, so your writings can help educate a lot of people.
You might consider this a "limited sort of fame", and you'll
have a chance to help a lot of people!
If you're new to the idea of blogs, a blog is a kind of website or
a part of a website where a person publishes bits of writing on the
weblog fairly frequently — maybe a few times each day, or once
a day, or less often. These bits of writing, called “entries”
or “posts,” generally appear on the front page of the weblog
in reverse chronological order, that is, with the newest entry at the
top of the page, with older entries progressively further down. Entries
of a certain age often disappear from the front page but all entries
are usually archived on separate pages, perhaps organized by date or
topic. More than simply "web diaries" - web logs are increasingly
seen as a new and very important form of journalism - as is described
in this article "Time
to blog on."
Entries can be short, maybe a sentence or a paragraph, but can also
be much longer. Entries might be written about other websites or entries
on other websites, including links to them, but they might also be the
author’s thoughts on events, politics, their own life… anything.
Our focus here is on schizophrenia - but feel free to integrate other
parts of your life in your blog (just as long as the majority of the
information is related to schizophrenia, and follows our guidelines
below).
For more information about blogs, and some good examples - please see
the following sites:
Some examples of good medical and disease-oriented blogs:
Your Contribution Appreciated: We're actively looking for many
more people to contribute - either as a person diagnosed with schizophrenia,
as a parent or family member (on a variety of issues - from getting
treatment, to getting housing, finding good doctors, getting government
assistance, etc.), and last but not least, professionals and academics
(biologist, psychiatrist, researcher, grad student, etc.). We'd love
to have some undergraduate and graduate psychiatry students doing blogs
on what they're learning during a year of schooling - share the knowledge!
We will contribute the space on schizophrenia and all you need to do
is volunteer your time. We'd love to see some family blogs about the
challenges and successes of getting treatment for your family member
(no real names are needed). We'd also like to get more professional
and academic involvement here to increase their representation here
- especially internationally - such as from Canada, the UK, India, etc.
Topics and perspectives that might be be good for blogs at this site
might include the following:
- Retrospective views on challenges and successes related to schizophrenia.
Comments on what things you've felt have been helpful in treatment.
- Personal experiences with the mental health system in your area
- positive and negative - and any recommendations you might have in
dealing with them.
- Personal experiences (of people with schizophrenia, or their family
members) in different countries around the world. We'd love to get
people from outside the USA to do blogs on their experiences and issues
they encounter (in terms of healthcare, people's opinions on schizophrenia,
etc.).
- Personal experiences with doctors (not mentioning them by name -
but general discussions about their treatment and things that you
found helpful or unhelpful).
- Daily experiences with schizophrenia - either from the person who
has schizophrenia, or a family member, friend or professional who
works with people that have schizophrenia.
- Good web sites that you've found valuable on schizophrenia - on
specific issues that you think are important.
- Your commentary on recent news related to schizophrenia (with links
to the news story)
- Comments and stories about delusions that you've see or experienced
- Comments on how drugs are working for you - and their side effects
that you're experiencing.
- Book Reviews
- Comments on TV programs, videos or movies that relate to schizophrenia
- Your report on a conference or meeting that is relevant to schizophrenia
(for example NAMI meetings, or scientific conferences on schizophrenia,
etc.) Even real-time (day by day, or hour by hour) blogs on conferences
and medical symposiums on schizophrenia.
- Advocacy approches to helping people with schizophrenia
Schizophrenia.com Site Blogging Guidelines: The rules for getting
and keeping a blog on the schizophrenia.com web site are pretty simple
- and they will evolve as we learn more about this new medium. Specifically
the are:
1. The blog must be predominantly about some important aspect or issue
that is somewhat related associated with schizophrenia. Its fine if
you want to create a blog that is focused on some other topic - but
there are many free places on which you can place those blogs and we
will encourage you to do so if the subject matter isn't reasonably closely
aligned with the schizophrenia.com's objectives of helping people with
schizophrenia and educating people about the illness.
2. Visitors like to see relatively active blogs - ideally at least
once, and preferably two postings a week. Of course everyone gets busy
and we are understanding of that. If it isn't very active then we may
move the blog down in the list of blogs we have at schizophrenia.com.
3. The blog cannot contain any recommendations or advice that is at
significant disagreement with the current professional standards of
care for people with schizophrenia, or that does not include a substantial
amount of supporting research if the area is a new one. Our goal here
is to have high-quality and accurate (scientifically valid) information
here that reflects the latest information on schizophrenia. We have
a group of schizophrenia researchers and professionals that volunteer
their expertise occasionally and we'll rely uopn their opinion in this
area.
4. The blogs at schizophrenia.com are designed to be predominantly
textual in nature. While the occasional photo is acceptable, we cannot
afford to have a heavily graphics-oriented blog on our site. No more
than 100kb of photos in a month should be posted to your blog.
5. The schizophrenia.com audience is a family audience (we get visitors
from age 10 to age 80). As such we'd like to keep the language used
on the site to that which is suitable for such visitors, with a minimum
of swear words.
6. Any professional writers that want to contribute in a blog on schizophrenia.com
may - at their option - claim copywrite of the material that they write
and post.
7. Writings in blogs should never promote the idea of suicide to readers
- either directly or indirectly. We already lose too many of our family
members and friends to this disease and we don't want anything that
could reasonably increase this.
We will expand and clarify these rules as we need to, but this captures
the general spirit of what we're trying to do with the blogs.
Vitamins for Schizophrenia 