Fifteen years of the critical/relational psychiatry blog

The first ever blog was about 30 years ago, probably as a place for Justin Hall, a student, to publish his writings on the internet (see The History of Blogging). Other people quickly followed creating “online diaries” and “personal pages” and the term “weblog” was coined in 1997 by Jorn Barger. It took me a while to realise what blogging was and this blog started 15 years ago today. The purchase of the Blogger platform by Google in 2003 making it freely available made it easy to learn how to blog, and I’ve made 659 posts in those 15 years,

Although I do have a personal blog as well, this critical/relational psychiatry blog has been in the area of the blogademia of psychiatry (see post on my personal blog about blogademia). The dogmatic nature of academic psychiatry, and academia in general, means it can be difficult for critical perspectives to be published in mainstream journals (see eg. previous post). Blogging is freely available and publicly accessible and I have tried to maintain academic standards in the posts I have made over the last 15 years.