Saturday, February 16, 2008

How to write for "Mental Health Investigations" blog

contact: MentalHealthInvestigations@gmail.com

The staff of Mental Health Investigations blog encourages everyone to post.

We publish submissions from professional writers, people who have never written for publication, and everyone in between.

Categories of submissions

We publish two general categories of submissions:

  1. Personal stories
  2. Summaries of published information
Guidelines for writing a personal story

-- Personal stories can be any length. They should be about you, someone you know, or someone you have interviewed. Your story must be true.

-- The goal of the "Mental Health Investigations" is to tell the truth about what happens in the American public mental health system.

-- We are looking for as many personal stories as possible, in order to create an accurate and believeable picture of the public mental health system, because multiple stories that make the same point give each other crediblity.

-- Your story should be factual. If you (or someone you know) had an experience with the public mental health system, you, we want you to talk about how that experience made you (or them) feel; but we are not interested in publishing third persona editoritials.

-- We will respect your confidentiality. If you to publish anonymously, we will reveal none of your personal details.

Guidelines for writing a news story summary

-- There is a critical need for news story summaries. Summaries should contain a short description of an article that appeared in print and/or on the internet, and references that would enable a researcher or interested reader to locate the article in the future.

-- Many small and medium sized newspapers do not make their archives available on the Web. They publish stories about abuse in mental health facilities. Our goal is to capture this information when it is published, or it may be lost forever.

-- Please respect copyrights. We are happy to accept links to full stories that appear on the internet; but without the publisher's permission, we will publish only a summary and a link to the original story.

-- Citations can be one of the following:
  • MLA Style Citation
  • APA Style Citation
  • Chicago Style Citation
We encourage MLA, but any of the above is fine.

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