Mental Help Net, the website and service I co-founded in 1995 with John Paton, has been on a downward slide since I left it in 1999. Recently, however, it seems to have forgotten (in my opinion) the meaning of being honorable to the people it does business with.

The History of Psychological Self-Help Online

In or around 1996, I met an author by the name of Clay Tucker-Ladd, Ph.D., a psychologist who had spent years toiling over a 1,000 massive self-help book entitled, Psychological Self-Help. It was a long but thoughtfully-written book that offered a myriad of helpful hints, exercises and techniques for people to simply help themselves with a number of emotional, relationship and mental health issues.

He had trouble finding a publisher for it, however, because of its size and his desire not to have it edited down to a smaller (and less helpful) version. Given its size, most publishers wouldn’t touch it. At the helm of Mental Help Net at the time, I thought it would be an ideal project for our still-young website to take on — publish the first online self-help book in its entirety. It would be greatly beneficial to our struggling, little site because it would double our size nearly overnight. The author asked for no licensing fee, and I decided the traffic and marketing benefits made it worth the small development cost. It was far easier to do than any of us thought and only took us a few months (only because we were working on a dozen other projects at the time) to get the entire book into HTML pages and published online.

Since that time, Dr. Tucker-Ladd’s book has drawn hundreds of thousands of visitors to the Mental Help Net site. Visitors that would’ve gone elsewhere to find the information had it not been for the agreement I struck with Dr. Tucker-Ladd while heading Mental Help Net.

After I left in 1999, the agreement with Dr. Tucker-Ladd was allowed to expire and neither side actively pursued renewing it. Mental Help Net went into decline and getting their staff to publish updates to the book was apparently akin to pulling teeth (they might be published, but it would often be after months of asking or getting no response from the site maintainers).

The Next Chapter for the Book

Over a year ago, Dr. Tucker-Ladd decided that he had enough with Mental Help Net’s poor treatment of his project, and as the owner and author of his book, he gave them notice he intended to pull the book off the site in a year’s time (to give them plenty of time to prepare and help redirect the pages to his new site) and published it only on his own website, Psychological Self-Help. Websites cost less than $100 to host nowadays, so the choice made a lot of sense to the author. Mental Help Net’s response was more stonewalling, denial, and even suggesting so far as that Mental Help Net had some sort of “right” to keep the book on its own site.

So how did Mental Help Net react when told that in a year’s time, they would have to stop publishing his book? They graciously thanked him for allowing his work to be published by Mental Help Net over the year, bringing in untold visitors and revenue (with the advertising Mental Help Net decided to publish on the book). In fact, they did not. Publishers often pay licensing fees to authors to publish their work on their websites (I know, as I too am a publisher). So rather than thanking him for the beneficial partnership they shared over the years, Mental Help Net — in a fit of pure greed, ignorance, or denial of reality — suggested that it had actually cost Mental Help Net $35,000 to publish and host his book. Completely ignoring the benefits the book brought to the site, they instead wanted to present the author with an after-the-fact, ignore-our-agreement bill!! In fact, the only person who knows how much time and effort went into the development of the online version of the book — me — was never asked. How Mental Help Net then arrived at that figure is beyond me.

When Mental Help Net was presented with a copy of the agreement I had signed with Dr. Tucker-Ladd, they backed off their ridiculous demands. Did they come out and agree to remove the book’s content on the agreed-upon date earlier this month? No, they went back into silent mode with no further communication with the book’s author.

Mental Help Net’s Poor Behavior

Finally, the fateful day arrived when Dr. Tucker-Ladd’s book was to be removed from Mental Help Net. So what did they do? Did they remove the book, put up a page to let readers know where they might find a copy of it, and redirect users to the book, as an honorable partner of 10 years might do?

Well, I think an set of images speaks volumes:

What did Mental Help Net do? Rip off Psychological Self-Help with a re-written version?

No, they did take care to ensure they couldn’t be accused of plagarism. But with an eye toward not losing the hundreds of pages of revenues that Psychological Self-Help represented, they did what any corporate entity would do — they wrote their own pages with “stuff” on them. What kind of stuff?

Well, I don’t really know. It’s largely unreferenced and the whole work is unattributed (violating the HON Code, which is nonetheless displayed on every page). It’s not clear if it was written in haste by some college students, or by an esteemed and respected psychologist.

So instead of acting with respect for their partnership and communicate openly and honestly with which they had had a 10 year relationship with, they apparently took the time and notice that Dr. Tucker-Ladd gave them and went about replicating similar content in their own “book.”

Poor Judgment or Just Too Poor?

At its best, this is an example, in my opinion, of poor judgment by a company too focused on the bottom line than respecting business relationships with long-time partners. When a company loses focus of treating with respect and honor its partners, it’s not likely to stop with a single partner. Personally, I avoid relationships with companies that act in a way that I couldn’t stand up and defend not only in a boardroom, but also around a table of normal consumers and colleagues.

Perhaps Mental Help Net is just so desperate for revenues that it couldn’t find a way to license new content to help it make ends meet. It’s too bad it is apparently on such hard times that after closing its community in 2000, the only way it can find a way to keep traffic coming back (and therefore make money) is by engaging in behavior such as this.

I’m now ashamed that I was responsible for publishing Psychological Self-Help on Mental Help Net, because of how horribly this situation was handled. If you had told me 5 years ago these people I knew and respected would act in this manner, I would’ve thought you were smoking crack.

Today, though, I’m also ashamed for ever having helped found Mental Help Net because of the depths, in my opinion, it has sunk to.

Full disclosure: I helped Dr. Tucker-Ladd publish his book on his own website, Psychological Self-Help.

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This entry was posted on Monday, July 17th, 2006 at 8:48 pm and is filed under General, Policy and Advocacy, Technology, Disorders, Depression, Bipolar, Psychology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

 

Last reviewed:
  On July 17, 2006
  By John M. Grohol, Psy.D.