Web Feeds for Mental Health Advocates

Note: All feeds listed provide fee-free content, feeds with open-licensed content are indicated.

New to web feeds?

Web feeds—sometimes called newsfeeds or just feeds, often prefixed with the feed format (e.g. RSS, Atom), and usually (but not always) indicated with this [orange news feed icon] feed icon—are a great way to get information from several sources all in one place. To use them, you'll need a feed reader. A couple of my favorites are Google Reader (web) and Pulse (Android, iPhone/iPad, or web).

Blogs

LD News feed

Learning disability and childhood mental health news headlines with descriptions from LD Online (a service of Washington, DC PBS affiliate, WETA-TV).

Mental Healthcare Reform feed

National Council for Community Behavioral Healthcare

NAMI Blog feed

National Alliance for Mental Illness

Psychiatric News Alert feed

Psychiatric News; American Psychiatric Publishing.

The blog from the Psychiatric News sees new content most weekdays, and the feed contains full posts. Despite some redundancy, both the blog and the newsletter (below) are worth keeping an eye on. The newsletter contains information never posted to the blog, and blog posts sometimes contain information that doesn't appear in the newsletter until two or more issues in the future.

SAMHSA Dialogue Blog feed

Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, US Department of Health and Human Services.

Contains …up-to-date information including articles from SAMHSA staff, announcements of new programs, links to reports, grant opportunities, and ways to connect to other resources… (“About”, SAMHSA Blog.).

TWLoHA Blog feed & TWLoHA News feed

To Write Love on Her Arms

Journals and other Publications

Data, Outcomes, and Quality feed

Center for Behavioral Health Statistics and Quality, Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, US Department of Health and Human Services.

Reports and data sets related to behavioral health, mental illness, and substance abuse.

Depression Research and Treatment feed

Open-access (Creative Commons Attribution 3.0); Hindawi Publishing.

PLoS ONE Alerts: Mental Health feed

Open-access (Creative Commons Attribution 2.5); Public Library of Science.

Psychiatric News feed

Bi-weekly newsletter from the American Psychiatric Association.

This feed is updated when a new issue is published (alternate Fridays) and contains headlines (with links) for the latest issue.

Translational Psychiatry feed

Open-access (Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 or Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0); Nature Publishing Group.

Contents for the current issue with link, author(s), and full citation.

Thoughts on Software (lacking) Usability: Electronic Medical Records

This post is written in response to the April 30 post Globe article on EMRs: status and the safety issue on the e-patients.net blog.

The abundance of hard-to-use software is the only issue that repeatedly gives me reason to reconsider my decision to leave the programming field.

Here's my take on the origin of the problem:

In order to develop software with good (much less excellent) usability, the design process must include collecting data about day-to-day operations in the context where the software will be used. That rarely happens. Instead, the standard process is to meet with a ‘customer’ and discuss their requirements. Often, the ‘customer’ in that meeting is a management-level company representative with little personal experience with the nitty-gritty of those day-to-day operations and who will seldom (if ever) use the software that's being developed.

It's a poor substitute, at best, and leads to a functional but hard to use end-product. At best, the result is cream of the crap.

An better approach would borrow an number of methods, including participant observation, from cultural anthropology to gather data about how information is obtained, used, and communicated in day-to-day operations.

For EMR software, this would mean data collection in in various healthcare facilities. It would require following staff to observe information flow; perhaps even hands-on experience working in an information-saturated non-clinical role.

The executive rumored to have scoffed at the idea of usability as a criterion probably understood this—specifically, he probably understood the kind of time and resources (i.e. money) necessary to develop software specifications the right way. That is, he understood that it would cut into his bottom line more than he was willing to accept.

After all, the only thing with such amazing ability to trump common sense is concern for one's own wallet.

Great Website! …with a not-so-great RSS Feed

In the last year, I've become a bit of an RSS junkie. I've also developed some rather strong opinions on the nature of feed content.

It isn't that I didn't use RSS feeds before, but — aside from iGoogle page widgets for Lifehacker's headlines and the release notes for the latest version of Calibre — I couldn't find a natural place in my life to use a newsreader application.What changed? I got a smart phone. (My phone and newsreader app of choice are topics for another time.)

However, upon becoming a regular user of RSS feeds, I quickly acquired a sense for both good and not-so-good feeds. I also discovered that the quality of the content on a website can be surprisingly unhelpful for predicting the quality of newsfeed content.

LD OnLine is a good illustration.

The website, ldonline.org is excellent! It's hands down one of my favorites on the topic of learning differences, and I highly recommend it. The content is well organized and addresses a fairly wide variety of audiences. The design is clean and professional, yet still friendly and approachable. Are there points that I would take issue with? Of course, but most are ubiquitous interface issues I've learned to tolerate (or hide).

In concept, the primary RSS feed "LD OnLine Daily News" is equally good — noteworthy headlines about learning differences and special education from a variety of Internet news sources. The problem is implementation. These were the three latest items in the feed when I started writing this post. I reformatted things to fit into a blog post and added the character counts in the left margin.

Content within this box is from LD OnLine Daily News http://feeds.feedburner.com/ldonline/news?format=xml (Accessed 26 Jan 2012).

Brain Scans Spot Early Signs of Dyslexia
January 26, 2012 09:00

192 charsInstead of waiting for a child to experience reading delays, scientists now say they can identify the reading problem even before children start school, long before they become labeled as poor…

496 charsStay current on the latest LD and ADHD news by signing up today for our free LD NewsLine service. Each week, you'll receive an e-mail with approximately three to seven of the top news headlines on learning disabilities, ADHD, special education, and other issues. LD Newsline is also available as an RSS Feed. A weekly version of LD NewsLine is also available. Each LD NewsLine includes direct links to the publication in which the headlines appeared and short excerpts from the original articles.

Special Educators Borrow from Brain Studies
January 26, 2012 09:00

195 charsWhile some educators remain skeptical, brain research is slowly migrating from the lab into the classroom, both in predicting which students may have learning difficulties and intervening to help…

496 charsStay current on the latest LD and ADHD news by signing up today for our free LD NewsLine service. Each week, you'll receive an e-mail with approximately three to seven of the top news headlines on learning disabilities, ADHD, special education, and other issues. LD Newsline is also available as an RSS Feed. A weekly version of LD NewsLine is also available. Each LD NewsLine includes direct links to the publication in which the headlines appeared and short excerpts from the original articles.

Apps for Children with Dyslexia
January 26, 2012 09:00

193 charsThe parent of a second grader newly diagnosed with dyslexia wrote me asking if I knew of any apps that might help her son with reading and math. She'd searched and come up with nothing — and so…

496 charsStay current on the latest LD and ADHD news by signing up today for our free LD NewsLine service. Each week, you'll receive an e-mail with approximately three to seven of the top news headlines on learning disabilities, ADHD, special education, and other issues. LD Newsline is also available as an RSS Feed. A weekly version of LD NewsLine is also available. Each LD NewsLine includes direct links to the publication in which the headlines appeared and short excerpts from the original articles.

Even without the character counts, two things are readily apparent about the second paragraph of each item: (1) it's considerably longer than the first, and (2) it's the same in all three items. The character counts show that the second paragraph isn't just longer, it's more than 2½ times longer!

On closer scrutiny, I noticed two more issues. While the longer second paragraph is promoting LD Online's LD NewsLine service and encouraging the reader to sign up for the service, it doesn't provide a link to the signup page. Additionally, the fourth sentence — the one beginning A weekly version… — is redundant. The reader already learned, in the second sentence, the service sends a weekly email.

I'm really disappointed that such a great website has so many problems in its RSS feed. If the feed content anywhere near the same quality as the website content, I'd have an RSS widget listing those headlines on this blog.