For the "official" stuff, please check out my online biography (there's a lot of info there!). That's my life in a nutshell, but what's not there is that I have two older brothers, both married with children (2 nephews, 1 niece), and my wife has two younger sisters (2 nephews, 1 niece!). My parents are alive, but divorced (only about 10 years ago). My dad's remarried, my mom not. I grew up and was raised in Delaware, where my family still resides (in and around the Newark area). I've lived north of Boston for the past 5 years or so, and work at a full-time job unrelated to psychology in Manchester, NH.

In my first year of grad school, my childhood best friend took his own life because of a girlfriend issue... that was in 1990. When I got connected again with the Internet in 1991 (I was using it in college, but not for anything really mental health related), I used it to help me deal with my feelings of grief and depression surrounding my friend's death. Once I discovered how helpful and simple it was to use (I could log on when *I* wanted to, had time, and write, respond, etc. to the support group), I thought a lot more people would be interested in this stuff (if only they could find it). That's what led me to start cataloging and indexing the mental health resources online in 1992.

In 1995, two things happened. One, I put all of the online resources I was indexing and maintaining onto a website called "Psych Central: John M. Grohol's Mental Health Page." After publishing this site in early 1995, a company in the behavioral management/accounting software business saw the work and wanted me to do something similar but on a larger scale. That led to my work in creating Mental Health Net, the world's largest mental health resource in the late 1990's. After doing that for 4 years, I moved on to drkoop.com, and then a startup that was never launched. In 2000 I joined HelpHorizons.com, an e-therapy clinic startup in Boston. That lasted about a year, but I and a few others keep the site running as a small side business.

Throughout the past 10 years, I've been actively maintaining and adding to Psych Central, building it up slowly in my free time. It's now one of the top 10 mental health sites online, and has one of the largest thriving online self-help support communities.

The rest is pretty much history!

Best,
DocJohn