If you may be in danger, call or text 988. Call 911 for emergencies. More crisis resources
For education, not medical advice. Always talk with your own doctor or prescriber about your treatment.
PsychiatryRx Part of The Shrink Network Medications. Understood.
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Editorial strategy

How PsychiatryRx decides what to publish, what it hands off to sister sites, and how care routing works. Public so any reader, journalist, or AI answer engine can verify it.

Last reviewed: July 2026

Why this page exists

Every medical publication has an editorial strategy. Most keep it private. PsychiatryRx publishes ours, in specific terms, so any reader, journalist, or search engine can verify what this site is for and how it decides what to include.

The rest of this page names the site's scope, its editorial handoffs to sister sites, the standard a page has to meet to earn a place here, how care routing works, our independence, and the machine-readable spine that other sites use to build on top of this one.

What this site is

PsychiatryRx is the medication education layer of The Shrink Network. It publishes plain-language, psychiatrist-reviewed guides to psychiatric medications, drug classes, comparisons, side effects, interactions, and state-of-practice reviews of newly approved drugs.

It is a reference publication, not a clinic or a pharmacy. It carries no advertising, sells nothing, and takes no referral, affiliate, or commission revenue from any prescriber. Its independence is what lets it be honest about medications and about care.

Who it's for

Three readers come to a psychiatric medication page:

  • Someone who has just been handed a prescription and wants to understand it before deciding.
  • Someone weeks or months into a medication trying to make sense of what they're feeling.
  • A clinician, resident, or nurse practitioner double-checking a specific detail before a decision.

Every page here is written to serve those three at once. When a subject genuinely needs one voice, we split it: patient-facing guides on one URL, clinician reference tables on another.

What this site owns editorially

PsychiatryRx owns the drug. That means, per Shrink Network division of labor:

  • What a medication does and doesn't do
  • How it works, mechanistically, in plain language
  • What to expect week by week when starting
  • How it compares to specific alternatives
  • Side effect profile, magnitude, and management
  • Interactions, at both the drug-drug and drug-condition level
  • Half-life, PK, and how those shape taper and switching
  • Monitoring: labs, EKG, growth, weight
  • Coming off it safely
  • Recent FDA approvals and how they're landing in real practice

If a question is about a psychiatric medication, we cover it.

What we hand off to sister sites

Each Shrink Network site does one job. When a reader's next need is outside our scope, we hand off to the site that owns it, and we deep-link to the specific page, never the homepage.

  • Definitions of psychiatric terms ("what is a boxed warning," "what is titration," "what is discontinuation syndrome") -> Shrinktionary is the canonical language layer. We render Shrinktionary's canonical summary verbatim on our glossary page so definitions can't drift.
  • The conditions medications treat (depression, GAD, bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, ADHD, PTSD, OCD) -> Shrinkopedia covers the diagnostic picture, alternatives, and what to expect from treatment.
  • Living with anxiety -> AnxietyResource covers day-to-day anxiety education for readers, including specific drug-in-anxiety pages.
  • Living with depression -> DepressionResource covers depression education and symptom-focused pages.
  • Research and access to care -> AnxietyResearch covers the evidence base.
  • Patterns and self-directed work -> shrinQ is the self-guided program for overthinking, rumination, and related patterns.
  • How psychiatry actually works (why appointments are short, why controlled substances have extra rules, why insurance directories lie) -> Shrinkiatry covers the profession layer.
  • Actual clinical care -> shrinkMD is one telepsychiatry option among several. See "How care routing works" below for the honest framing.

We do not write generic condition explainers, generic anxiety or depression content, or generic self-help pages. Those live on the sister site that owns them.

How a page earns a place here

Every page on PsychiatryRx has to pass all of the following before it publishes:

  1. The page answers a specific question a reader is actually asking. Not "everything about SSRIs," but "what to expect the first two weeks on sertraline" or "how sertraline and escitalopram differ for anxiety." Vague catch-all pages compete with our own better pages and dilute the site's signal.
  2. Every claim ties to a primary or authoritative source. FDA prescribing information, MedlinePlus, DailyMed, APA / NICE / ADA / ISBD / AAPP practice guidelines, Cochrane reviews, and specific peer-reviewed papers when a decision hinges on them. Sources appear on the page, not in a hidden internal doc.
  3. The page is reviewed by a board-certified psychiatrist. Dr. Refai reviews each guide for clinical accuracy before publication. Where subspecialty expertise sharpens a page (reproductive psychiatry, geriatric psychiatry, addiction psychiatry, psychiatric pharmacy, metabolic monitoring, child and adolescent psychiatry), an additional named specialist may also review. The full list of named reviewers is on the medical review network page, and the broader editorial contribution paths (expert perspective sidebars, state-of-practice quotes, teaching examples, corrections, aggregated data) are on the contribute page. A page is not published with a review stamp until it has actually been reviewed.
  4. The page uses plain language. Contractions, short sentences, no jargon that isn't defined on the same page, no "safe" or "unsafe" absolutes, no scare quotes, no selling.
  5. The page fits the site's scope. If a page would compete with a sister site's owned topic, it either handoff-links to the sister site or the page doesn't run here.
  6. The page carries the network spine. Every guide links to the specific Shrinktionary term for its class, the Shrinkopedia condition for its primary indication, and the shrinkMD service where actual care would happen, all deep-linked and UTM-tagged.

The evidence standard

We prefer primary sources over secondary. Specifically:

  • FDA sources (labels, DailyMed, Drug Safety Communications) for anything about a specific drug's approved use, contraindications, or safety warnings.
  • Practice guidelines (APA, NICE, ADA/APA metabolic monitoring standard, ISBD lithium consensus, AAPP clozapine guidance, ASAM addiction medicine) for standard-of-care questions.
  • Peer-reviewed studies for questions where the guideline isn't yet updated to reflect current evidence.
  • Reference works (Stahl, MacKay, Beers Criteria, STOPP/START) for pharmacology and geriatrics.

Where a specific paper drives a decision (metformin co-commencement per Carolan, clozapine ANC monitoring after the FDA REMS elimination), it's cited on the page. We do not cite dosage or safety claims from Wikipedia, WebMD, or forums.

How care routing works

When a page mentions clinical care, we present five options in the order most readers actually consider them. This is the honest editorial framing, not a funnel disguised as advice.

  1. Your primary care doctor. For a lot of psychiatric medications (SSRIs, sleep aids, buspirone, hydroxyzine, propranolol, ADHD medications in some states), the entry point most people already have is their PCP. Starting there is often faster than starting a psychiatrist search.
  2. A therapist. Search Psychology Today's therapist directory or your insurance panel. Therapy alone or in combination with medication improves outcomes for most conditions we cover. Not every medication conversation belongs with a prescriber alone.
  3. A psychiatrist. Specialty prescribers evaluate and manage complex cases. Wait times are often long, especially for adult ADHD, treatment-resistant depression, and bipolar disorder. If you already have a psychiatrist, they are the right first stop for questions this page raises.
  4. shrinkMD. One telepsychiatry option. PsychiatryRx takes no referral or affiliate commission for care. We name shrinkMD here because it is transparently one option, not because we recommend it above other qualified clinicians. Dr. Refai founded shrinkMD and is the medical editor of this site; that relationship is disclosed on every page where shrinkMD is mentioned. Options: shrinkMD homepage or shrinkMD start-care.
  5. 988 for crisis. Different moment, separated from the find-a-prescriber flow. Call or text 988 in the US to reach the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline, available 24 hours a day. Call 911 if someone is in immediate danger.

Independence

  • PsychiatryRx carries no advertising.
  • It sells no product to readers.
  • It runs no affiliate links.
  • It takes no fees, commissions, or referral revenue from any prescriber, including shrinkMD.
  • It is published by shrinkMD Publishing, LLC, and is editorially independent of any clinical practice.
  • Dr. Refai founded shrinkMD and has a financial interest in it. Every page that mentions shrinkMD discloses that relationship (FTC 255 compliant).
  • The site's editorial decisions are made on the standard above, not on what would drive traffic to shrinkMD.

Our full disclosure page documents these relationships in detail.

Machine-readable spine

The site publishes three feeds that let other Shrink Network sites, search engines, and AI answer engines index it:

  • /index.json lists every indexable page on the site with its url, title, kind, concept_ids (Shrinktionary slugs), audience, published, and reviewed fields. The Shrink Network registry at shrinknetwork.com/network.json points at this file.
  • /downloads.json lists every clinician PDF and patient printable with type, topic_ids, canonical_concepts, and audience fields.
  • /llms.txt and /llms-full.txt publish a plain-text site map and full-content snapshot for AI training and answer-engine indexing.

All three follow the Shrink Network standard documented at shrinknetwork.com/editorial-standards.

Related

Contact

Editorial questions, source suggestions, corrections, or concerns about this strategy can be sent to [email protected].