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Sharecare Names Top 10 Social HealthMakers on Mental Health

List Reveals Web’s Most Influential Mental Health Experts & Advocates

ATLANTA, December 17, 2013 – Mental illness affects one in four American adults in any given year, according to the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI), yet approximately 40 percent of them don’t receive mental health services. Additionally, less than half of youth between the ages of 8 and 15 with a mental illness get treatment each year. In an effort to provide people impacted by mental illness with empowering information and resources, Sharecare, the online health and wellness engagement platform founded by Dr. Mehmet Oz and Jeff Arnold, today announced its Top 10 Social HealthMakers on Mental Health, a list of experts and advocates leading today’s online conversations about mental health across topics including anxiety, bipolar disorder, depression, eating disorders and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD):

  1. Daniel Amen, MD 
    A psychiatrist, best-selling author, self-help blogger and medical director of the Amen Clinics, Dr. Amen is renowned for applying brain imaging science to everyday clinical practice.
  2. Julie Hanks, MSW, LCSW
    A licensed therapist with 20 years of experience counseling women, couples and families, Hanks runs Wasatch Family Therapy. Author of The Burnout Cure, she is a relationship expert, media contributor, blogger and speaker.
  3. Emily Deans, MD
    A clinical psychiatrist who manages and treats patients with major mental illness, Deans is passionate about searching for the evolutionary solutions to the health problems of the 21st century. She also blogs about mental health and nutrition for Psychology Today.
  4. Natasha Tracy
    Author of the award-winning Breaking Bipolar blog on HealthyPlace.com and the Bipolar Burble blog, Tracy is a passionate mental health advocate who has been diagnosed with bipolar disorder.
  5. Margarita Tartakovsky, MS
    An associate editor at award-winning mental health website PsychCentral.com and the voice behind Weightless, a blog that helps women address body image issues and disordered eating, Tartakovsky also writes a monthly feature for Beliefnet.com on patience and procrastination.
  6. Norman Rosenthal, MD
    Dr. Rosenthal is a clinical professor of psychiatry at Georgetown Medical School and also maintains a private practice. A winner of numerous awards, he is best known for leading the team that defined Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD) and pioneered the use of light therapy to treat it while he was at the National Institute of Mental Health.
  7. Kristina Randle, PhD
    A licensed psychotherapist who contributes to the column “Ask the Therapist” at PsychCentral.com, Randle is also an assistant professor of social work and criminology and hosts her own blog exploring the intersections of mental health and high-profile criminal cases.
  8. Brian Weiss, MD
    America’s leading authority on past life therapy and best-selling author of several books including Many Lives, Many Masters, Dr. Weiss conducts national seminars and experimental workshops for the public and professionals. He is chairman emeritus of psychiatry at Mount Sinai Medical Center in Miami.
  9. Dinah Miller, MD
    Psychiatrist and voice behind Shrink Rap, a blog for psychiatrists and a contributor to Psychology Today’s blog, Shrink Rap Today, Dr. Miller has an outpatient private practice and works at Johns Hopkins Community Psychiatry Program.
  10. Harold S. Koplewicz, MD
    One of the nation’s leading child and adolescent psychiatrists, Dr. Koplewicz is widely recognized as an innovator in the field, a strong advocate for child mental health and a master clinician. He is the founding president of the Child Mind Institute, a nonprofit dedicated to transforming mental health care for children, and is a contributor to Huffington Post.

More information about Sharecare’s Top 10 Social HealthMakers on Mental Health can be found at https://www.sharecare.com/static/top-ten-social-healthmakers-mental-health.

MethodologySharecare Social HealthMakers are among the most influential people in health and wellness on the web, driving conversations on the leading edge of many health topics. They address a wide range of issues within specific topic areas while demonstrating consistent impact across multiple interactive channels—such as Twitter, Facebook, videos and blogs. This impact is measured through a proprietary algorithm based on more than 100 individual metrics developed and powered by WCG, the leading digital marketing and communications agency, quantifying topic relevance, syndication, presence and reach. Earlier Sharecare lists have identified Social HealthMakers in weight loss, infertility, heart disease, fitness, Alzheimer’s disease and more.

About Sharecare

Sharecare is a health and wellness social engagement platform that helps people to live healthier lives by connecting them to personalized resources including high-quality information from national experts, interactive tools and local healthcare providers. The power behind the site is its groundbreaking and popular, scientifically-based health risk assessment, the RealAge® Test, taken by more than 30 million people since its inception in 1998, and a unique, social Q&A format that provides the collective wisdom of America’s top experts—greatly simplifying the search for health information. Created by Jeff Arnold and Dr. Mehmet Oz in partnership with Harpo Productions, Sony Pictures Television and Discovery Communications, Sharecare allows people to ask, learn and act upon questions of health and wellness, creating an active community where knowledge is shared and put into practice—simply said, sharing care. Launched in 2010, Sharecare is based in Atlanta, GA.

About WCG

Founded and led by chairman and CEO Jim Weiss, WCG is focused on integrated business solutions in the areas of innovation, change and growth for the world’s leading companies and brands. WCG serves clients through a network of offices in San Francisco, New York, Chicago, Washington, D.C., Austin, Los Angeles and London. For more than a decade, WCG’s seasoned professionals have specialized in providing analytics, content, engagement and strategy to a diverse set of clients across the consumer, technology, healthcare and pharmaceutical industries.