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 Bipolar Disorder are a great way to allow people to share experiences
and information on bipolar disorder, and to ultimately get better public
understanding and treatment for people with bipolar disorder.
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 bipolar disorder, and a little about
your background). You'll get instant access to the thousands of 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 bipolar disorder - 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 bipolar disorder, 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 bipolar
disorder, 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 bipolar disorder and
all you need to do is write. 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 bipolar
disorder. 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 bipolar disorder, 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 bipolar disorder, 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 bipolar disorder - either from the person
who has bipolar disorder, or a family member, friend or professional
who works with people that have bipolar disorder.
- Good web sites that you've found valuable on bipolar disorder -
on specific issues that you think are important.
- Your commentary on recent news related to bipolar disorder (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 bipolar
disorder
- Your report on a conference or meeting that is relevant to bipolar
disorder (for example NAMI meetings, or scientific conferences on
bipolar disorder, etc.) Even real-time (day by day, or hour by hour)
blogs on conferences and medical symposiums on bipolar disorder.
- Advocacy approches to helping people with bipolar disorder
Bipolar Focus Site Blogging Guidelines: The rules for getting
and keeping a blog on the bipolar disorder.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 bipolar disorder. 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 bipolar disorder.com's objectives of helping people
with bipolar disorder 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 Bipolar Focus.
3. The blog cannot contain any recommendations or advice that is at
significant disagreement with the current professional standards of
care for people with bipolar disorder, 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 bipolar disorder. We have
a group of bipolar disorder researchers and professionals that volunteer
their expertise occasionally and we'll rely uopn their opinion in this
area.
4. The blogs at Bipolar Focus 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 bipolar disorder audience here 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 bipolar
disorder 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.
