GNIF Brain Blogger



Established in 2005 by Shaheen Lakhan and Ray McIntyre of the Global Neuroscience Initiative Foundation, the GNIF Brain Blogger is a syndicated news resource that reviews topics related to neuroscience, psychiatry, and neurology, and on brain disorder related stigmatization and discrimination. It offers articles from multidimensional biopsychosocial perspectives adherent to their official slogan, "Science is all but devoid of certainty." It is listed and indexed in Google News, consulted by secondary and tertiary schools in their official curriculum, and it visited by thousands regularly. A Google search produces over a hundred-thousand results. Moreover, the bloggers freely accept questions that are quickly answered by biomedical scientists over many fields.

The blog has been syndicated and/or featured by numerous media outlets, most prominently Reuters, FoxNews.com, usatoday.com, Palm Beach Post, Austin American Statesman, Cox Ohio Publishing, iVillage, and the Internet Broadcasting Systems (IBS) — a publisher of over 70 American TV station websites such as CNN.com.

The GNIF Brain Blogger resource has initiated several major projects that have fostered global education of common, yet often confused, mental disorders. From February 2006, the group began an Anti-Stigmatization series. In cooperation with the GNIF Ethics in Mental Health campaign, this blog served as the online component of the partnership. Since the same time period, the group also introduced a major concept in the health blogs: a series of posts on the biopsychosocial model of health and illness. It postulates that a narrow scope on health where "health equals lack of disease" limits our understanding of wellbeing, thwarts our treatments efforts, and suppresses prevention measures. In partnership with the GNIF's Living with a Brain Disorder project, the Brain Blogger launched abbreviated interviews of individuals with neurological and/or psychiatric disorders from 2005.

The blog in 2007 introduced the Guest Blogger section where "scholars from a wide array of fields contribute exceptional articles related to mental health." This category's first racy article, "Is War a Psychosis?" by Dr. Frank MacHovec incited tremendous discussion. Moreover, their roundtable on the anti-psychiatry movement fostered deeper understanding on the Scientology versus psychiatry issue.