Comparative Analysis of Two Schizophrenia Related Web-sites As we know, the modern world gives us plenty of possibilities to get access to information. Libraries and encyclopedias is the matter of past, the Internet or World Wide Web is a new and most efficient way to access information nowadays. Some people say you can find everything in the Internet. But is this true? And can we believe this everything that we find in the Internet? There are many pros and contras of this subject. To form our own point of view, be it a wrong or right point, we want to compare two psychology related web-sites. The topic of interest is schizophrenia.
Let us see what is the way these two web-sites give information about this mental illness and whether we can believe this information. First of all, we start our search. Schizophrenia is a key-word and we type it in the search field of Google search engine. We get approximately 1,660,000 results. We do not want to read all this, therefore we take the first link and this is http://www.schizophrenia.com. The words Information, Support, Education seem to be promising.
It seems that everybody, be he a student, a patient or a doctor, can find here information he needs. The site is updated because the last news in the news section dates the 16-th of July, 2004 (today is 18-th of July, 2004).
In schizophrenia information section of the web-site we find much information concerning this mental illness: what it is, illness description, symptoms and diagnosis, medications and treatments, history of schizophrenia, et cetera. Discussion, Support, Chat section tells us that there are 24,000 members participating in their discussions and invites to join them. We can see that there are different categories participating in these discussions: parents, children, brothers, sisters etc. Also in this section we see that there are international discussions, the list of countries provided.
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We see that this web-site is reach in resources. But can we believe this source? Who are these people that stand behind this project? We go to the section named About. Here we find about what is schizophrenia.com: Started in 1995, Schizophrenia.com is a leading web community dedicated to providing high quality information, support and education to the family members, caregivers and individuals who’s lives have been impacted by schizophrenia. The site is managed by a group of between 10 and 15 independent volunteers and contractors around the world – all of whom are either family members (with sons & daughters, brothers and sisters, or parents who have suffered from schizophrenia) or people who have schizophrenia. While none of us are mental health professionals, we are very familiar with the disease both through direct personal experience and extensive reading on the topic. We rely upon what we believe are good sources of scientifically accurate materials relating to schizophrenia and frequently consult with an ever growing group of schizophrenia researchers who act as unofficial advisors to the site (http://www.schizophrenia.com/about.html) From this passage we want to underline the words: none of us are mental health professionals.
Although they state that they work with mental health professionals, we may doubt the content of the site filled with non-professionals. Nevertheless, it does not reduce the value of this web-site as a non-professional source of schizophrenia mental illness. You can go there and read other people thoughts and life experience. The site is a kind of soap-box where everybody can say what he or she thinks. Our next objective is the number two web-site in the list of Google found results. This is the web-site www.mentalhealth.com and its section for schizophrenia.
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The site is called Internet Mental Health and deals not only with schizophrenia but also with some other psychotic disorders as eating disorders, childhood disorders, cognitive disorders etc. This proves that the site covers a larger area of mental illnesses and disorders than schizophrenia.com. However, we are interested only in schizophrenia. Therefore, we go to the schizophrenia section of the site mentalhealth.com. First we find the table containing general information about the illness: psychotic and postpsychotic phases of schizophrenia, active phase, associated problems in these phases and so on. The next section contains description (American, European, the description from U.S. Surgeon General and World Health Organization report), diagnosis, web community, treatment, research, books, booklets, legislation, stories of recovery and personal experiences, etc. Then goes the section of articles and journal abstracts, providing us with information from many professional editions.
It is difficult to judge whether this web-site or schizophrenia.com gives us more information on this topic, either way we should read all this material to form our opinion. What we can do is to go and find out whether we can believe all this material, how professional it is. Our Purpose section tells us much: Internet Mental Health is a free encyclopedia of mental health information created by a Canadian psychiatrist, Dr. Phillip Long. This section tells us why they started, who they want to reach, what they want to share, and a very important in our opinion statement about funding for Internet Mental Health. It says that Internet Mental Health is completely funded by Dr. Phillip Long and they do not have any corporate sponsors.
In the case with schizophrenia.com much attention was to the fact of donations you can provide for their site. The conclusion we make is that both these sites are useful but they aim at different audiences. The Internet Mental Health is more professional aimed while schizophrenia.com is more for non-professionals (that doesnt exclude the possibility that some professionals may use this site for some purposes).
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This example of comparing these two web-sites shows that the Internet is a great resource of information for psychology related topics but we need to be cautious whether we get what we want. Works Cited Internet Mental Health, July 18, 2004 . Schizophrenia.com, July 18, 2004 ..
