Mental Health, Celebrities Get New Website

Via the New York Times' Well blog, of which I am a fan, comes word that PsychCentral.com has begun a new blog called Celebrity Psychings. It's dedicated to celebrities, their mental health issues, and the broader treatment of mental health issues on TV shows and the like. It's authored by Alicia Sparks, who used to write the Mental Health Notes blog, which I've actually read and linked to in the past.

The blog is new enough to where I cannot tell whether it's good or bad, but it's an interesting idea to devote time and money to celebs in such a fashion. My own view is that too many Americans spend far too much time digesting information about celebs. I've never been one of them, likely because I am jaded by the many years I spent doing theatre work in the 1980s and early-1990s and dealing with actors and actresses who ran the gamut from asshole to wonderful.

My prejudices aside, people do pay closer attention to whatever social phenomenons celebs are attached to and, perhaps, absorb more information about whatever is at stake. So in a social reality sense what PsychCentral is doing makes perfect sense. It'll be interesting to see how this plays out over time. I certainly wish Sparks luck and it sure must be nice to get an intro from the Times.

Which brings me to another point. Despite the fact that I have linked to the paper and its website like a billion times and despite the fact that I've fallen all over myself to praise the paper's good work on mental health matters (and occasionally damn its missteps), the paper has never linked to me once, has never mentioned this site or my work here (even where it probably owed me a courtesy attribution), has actively ignored me when it wrote about people writing about mental health issues on the 'Net (even though some of the people profiled in that piece actively pointed the writer in my direction) and so on. Meanwhile, the Well blog has mentioned PsychCentral on several occasions, which is fine because I am globally OK with PsychCentral and they've supported and encouraged my work here and I've linked to them a ton.

I mention this not because I am bitter, but because I find the situation odd and because it actually amuses me. But, from time to time, it sure does make me wonder what the hell is behind the dynamic, because I know for fact that there are people at the paper who read this site and like my work. I'm sure I'll never know.