Longer description of your proposed project

We’d like to nurture a virtual space for rigorous thinking, exploration, and synthesis aimed at improving the shared paradigm in psychiatric and psychological research. It will be less formal than a peer-reviewed journal but more formal than a group blog–a curated, edited quarterly online publication like Aeon or Palladium, aimed at cultivating a thriving scene around the quality and integrity of the shared psychiatric/psychological paradigm.

Why?

Practitioners and clients in the fields of psychiatry and psychology find the output of the psych research community to be inadequate for helping them better do their work or solve their problems.

I think this won’t get better until the research paradigm in psychiatry improves, because the current paradigms (including the DSM, RDoC, and default experimental research methods) are not useful enough to practitioners. I think that if the researchers who are already interested in improving the research paradigm have a named, established space with support from editors to refine their ideas and engage in dialogue with each other in terms that are clearly -about- the philosophy, the metascience, the process, the assumptions–then this improvement process will go faster than it would otherwise.

This paradigmatic progress is, as far as I can tell, a necessary component of improving modern psychiatric crisis care (the aim of our organisation).

Questions we’d like to ask (and keep asking):

Foundational:

- What are the basic ‘things’ in the default paradigm(s) in psychiatry, and what potentially-important stuff cannot be included in the ‘set of real things’?

- What are the hidden assumptions that frame how researchers hunt for causal mechanisms (e.g. in NIMH-funded research) in psychiatry and psychology, and what are their limitations?

- What questions would practitioners in history using [e.g. theologians, shamanic practitioners] find easy to answer that modern scientific researchers find difficult or impossible to answer or investigate?

- A comparison of the major benefits and limitations of different science-adjacent methods of developing knowledge.

- What is the relationship between the scientific establishment and the practitioner community (from multiple angles), and what are the limitations and opportunities?

- What theoretical assumptions are behind the implicit relationship between neuroscience research, psychiatric and psychological research, and psychiatric and psychological practice, and what are the limitations and opportunities?

- What is generalisability and why are we trying to get it? Can we do without it?

- What does rigour look like in related knowledge domains outside of psychiatric science? How can we compare rigour across multiple domains?

New Ideas:

- What is a mental disorder?

- How do we know if someone’s mental disorder is ‘healed’?

- Who should pay for mental health treatment, and why?

- How might we incorporate [interactions within systems, nebulosity of categories, idiographic phenomena etc] into a rigorous scientific method for psychiatry and psychology?

- Proposals for incorporating the subjectivity of researchers into the design of scientific methods for investigating psychiatric/psychological phenomena

- How might we account for power dynamics within the practice of psychology and psychiatry?

Initial marketing:

- Start a twitter account and network it with the major accounts in psychiatry and psychology

- Promotion by our authors to their own social network audiences

- Launch promotion on related sites such as Psychiatric Times and Mad in America

Describe why you think you're qualified to work on this

People who plan to be involved in the editorial team:

- Jessica Ocean: project lead, CEO of psychcrisis.org, member of California Behavioral Health Planning Council

- Evelyn McLean: writer/editor, history of psychology researcher, graduate student in social work

- Esha Khurana: practising psychiatrist, focused on combined medical-psychiatric issues

Track record (by Jess):

- I started psychcrisis.org in March 2022 and have raised ~$240K since its inception, much from private individuals.

- Our org is about to sign a ~$3 million/year contract with a Norcal twin-county system to establish their first mental health mobile crisis system; our team is led by two veterans of a unique crisis-response model called CAHOOTS; they have a combined 17 years of experience in the field and have established 13 new teams already.

- Since we started we’ve self-published 25 substack essays and 5 podcast interviews (with people who have made an unusual impact on the mental health system)

Other ways I can learn about you

@utotranslucence on Twitter; a recent introductory piece I wrote on practical epistemology for systems change in this area (for people unfamiliar with the concept of epistemology): https://psychcrisis.substack.com/p/a-note-on-knowing-things

How much money do you need?

Budget: Most of the cost is part-time hourly work by contracted editors, and a small amount of money for website operating costs. Assuming a $50/hour rate for freelance editing work (this hasn’t been negotiated yet, so it could change), $5000 would pay for 100 hours or roughly three months worth of work at 8-10 hours a week. I think two people could launch this and publish four editions a year this way, which would cost $40K for a year. This is assuming a simple wordpress website and minimal branding or logo development, which could add $5-10K to the launch costs if we paid an extra person to do this (we could otherwise rely on pro bono design work from friends).

So, a menu:

$10K: some startup costs, a tightly-budgeted first issue, a bit of time to find more funding

$50K: Fund it comfortably for its first year, including some money for branding and web dev

$90K Fund the whole thing for two years, and/or less time with the opportunity to bring on more editors, or experiment with advertising or different review processes.

(These costs don’t include costs like paying our accounting team to administer this grant, or to onboard freelancers, or recruiting any additional editors, but if you wanted to add some % like 5% or 10% for that you could; it’s currently being funded out of our unrestricted donations so additional funding for ops extends the runway of our existing donations.)

Links to any supporting documents or information

Current project site: psychcrisis.org. Substack: psychcrisis.substack.org.

Estimate your probability of succeeding if you get the amount of money you asked for

Publishing at least one issue within six months? 85%

Creating a sustainable publication that exists for a decade or more? 30%

Conditional on the publication existing for at least a decade, chance that it has a major influence on the thinking of psychiatric researchers (e.g. like the Eranos conferences influenced humanities thinkers) to the point of influencing new funding opportunities within the decade: 30%