This is our 1,000th Mental Elf blog and so I thought now would be a good time to reflect on what we have achieved since starting this website in the Spring of 2011.

Today’s blog will:

• Look back at the last 3 years and consider what research we’ve covered, what’s worked well and what we need to improve
• Look forward to next year and our exciting plans for launching the National Elf Service
• We want your comments (good, bad and indifferent), so please take two minutes to tell us what you think of the Mental Elf
• And if you love what we do, please show your love by voting for us in the UK Blog Awards

Keeping up to date with the Mental Elf

We have always been clear about our aims and objectives; to help busy health and social care professionals keep up to date with reliable mental health research.

For the last three and a bit years we’ve done this by publishing five blogs each week that highlight evidence-based research that we think is interesting and relevant.

It’s never been harder to keep up to date with the best available evidence. Sure, we have the technology, but there’s a mountain of guidelines, policy documents and research papers published every week and people just don’t have the time to read it all and decide what’s relevant to them. What’s more, many professionals don’t have the critical appraisal skills to work out if relevant evidence is reliable.

Our followers seem to like our brief, readable blogs with clinical commentaries, written by our ever-growing team of expert bloggers. So we’ve expanded beyond mental health into lots of different areas:

Subject coverage

We have tried to feature evidence that is relevant to UK mental health practice in our blogs so far and looking back we can see the most popular mental health conditions have been:

1. Depression
2. Substance misuse
3. Schizophrenia
4. Anxiety disorders
5. Psychosis
6. Dementia
7. Suicide and self-harm
8. Bipolar disorder
9. ADHD
10. PTSD

What’s missing from this list? What mental health conditions would you like to see covered in our top ten?

We prioritise high quality study designs and you can see this looking at the most popular publication types that we have included:

1. Systematic review
2. Meta-analysis
3. Randomised controlled trials
4. Cohort studies
5. Guidelines

The interventions we primarily cover are the usual suspects:

1. Psychotherapies
2. Antidepressants
3. Antipsychotics
4. Exercise
5. Mood stabilisers

What would you like to see featured more often on the site? Please share your thoughts in the comments below.

Our contributors

By far the most pleasing aspect of running this website has been the way in which other health professionals, researchers, students, librarians and service users have come together to contribute their blogs. I invited others to start writing early in 2013 and since then we have built up a dedicated team of expert elves from all over the world. I owe a huge debt of gratitude to this team of intrepid and dedicated people, who all give up their time for free, safe in the knowledge that the Great Elf Mother is smiling down on them.

Special mention has to go to two teams of people who have contributed a huge number of blogs between them:

1. Marcus Munafò and colleagues (Suzi, Amy, Olivia, Helen, Meg and Sally) at the University of Bristol Tobacco and Alcohol Research Group
2. Matt Field and his colleagues (Paul, Andy and Abi) at the University of Liverpool Addiction Research Group

But everyone who has contributed has been brilliant. We now have 85 bloggers from 10 different countries and we still welcome contributions from people with the right combination of skills and expertise. Find out more and get involved yourself.

Our audience

But of course it’s you, dear readers, who mean the world to us elves. It’s getting chilly now in the woodland and the campfire isn’t always roaring, but our cockles are warmed every time we think of your delighted faces; opening a new blog and eagerly reading about new and valuable research.

We are expecting somewhere in the region of half a million page views in 2014, which is double what we had in 2013. Our Twitter following has recently passed 22,000 and we are steadily building an audience on Facebook, Google+ and LinkedIn as well. Our free monthly email newsletter is also a popular way of keeping up to date.

It makes it all worthwhile when we meet new readers and get positive feedback from mental health experts, professionals and service users alike. Thank you all for your continued interest in what we do and please keep sending constructive comments so we can improve the service.

Our most popular blogs

We are always evaluating what we do and trying to build on what works well. Popular blogs are those that bring in lots of readers, but more than that, those that succeed in getting people to engage with the evidence. That might mean taking on-board some new knowledge and using it in practice, it might mean participating in an organised discussion (a tweet chat or webinar) and sometimes it’s simply an evidence bun-fight where researchers, practitioners, clinicians and the rest of us get together online for some bare-fisted debating.

Here are some of the blogs we’ve published in recent months that we think have been especially engaging:

• No support for peer support?
• Pilot study suggests that CBT may be a viable alternative to antipsychotics for people with schizophrenia, or does it?
• People with mental illness are more likely to be victims of homicide than perpetrators of homicide
• Placebo for depression: are some sugar pills better than others?
• Psychotherapy trials should report the side effects of treatment
• Alternatives to medication for agitation in dementia
• Cannabis, cigarette smoking and psychosis: do we need a rethink?
• New evidence on antidepressants and suicide risk in children and young people
• Long term maintenance treatment with antipsychotics: a cautionary note from recent research
• New NICE guidance recommends that all NHS hospitals and clinics become completely smoke-free

Our plans for 2015 and beyond

We will be launching the National Elf Service next year, which will bring together all eleven existing elves into one wonderful website. We are really excited about all the new features and functionality that the new site will bring.

When you join the National Elf Service you will become an elf and start playing a game that will incentivise you to:

• Keep up to date with the latest evidence-based research,
• Connect with colleagues and experts in your field, and
• Track your learning and contribute to your continuing professional development.

We’ll be announcing more details about Elf Notes, Badgers, Campfires and Elf Professors before too long. The wait is almost over ;-)

Please vote for us now!

Finally, we are delighted to announce that we have been nominated for the UK Blog Awards. Please take a minute to show your appreciation for all the hard work that has gone into making this site what it is, by voting for us:

Vote for the Mental Elf in the UK Blog Awards now!