# Research scope and evidence guide

This investigation reconstructs the history of InterPsych, founded by Ian Pitchford, from publicly accessible online sources, checked on 22 October 2026 and extended on 30 and 31 October 2026. It covers conception, launch, naming, expansion, governance, hosting, publications, reception and later traces. It is a broad historical investigation, not a claim that every online resource or private document has been recovered.

The source catalogue contains 411 source records. The 111 records from the first investigation correspond to unique online document URLs drawn from 136 annotated entries; the 30 October 2026 accession added 62 further sources and the 44 forum pages of the archived Sheffield directory; the 31 October 2026 supplement added 179, and a later review the same day added 15. Duplicate URLs have been merged; aliases preserve the original research identifiers. Different mirrors and publications by the same people remain related evidence, not independent witnesses. The dated chronology has 64 entries. The people index is selective and its roles refer to the stated historical dates, not current appointments.

Searches used ordinary web search, Exa, BIONET/Usenet and university mailing-list archives, FU Berlin’s newsletter collection, Wayback CDX indexes and actual captures, professional journalism, conference programmes, scholarly publications, author manuscripts, CVs, library catalogues and New York public records. Search terms combined InterPsych/PsychNet/GlobalPsych with founders, forum leaders, dates, hosting, incorporation, newsletter, dispute, closure, journal, trauma, telehealth and later citations. English, German, French and other international references were followed when found. Similar-name clinics, employment-services businesses and modern companies were excluded.

The bounded FU Berlin retrieval attempted 329 URLs and retrieved 310 HTML pages. This includes frames, indexes, duplicated issue/section presentations and unrelated resources. It is not that many independent sources or a claim every page was closely read. Four concurrent requests, a 20-second timeout, maximum 400 URLs and maximum depth eight were used; traversal ended naturally at depth three. Full-text searches identified passages for close reading.

The separate historical-site recovery saved 44 HTML pages and matching text files, plus archive indexes and retrieval logs. Searches included Sheffield, St John’s, Michigan, InterPsych.org, InterPsych.net, Idaho State, FSU, schizophrenia.com and Dartmouth host paths. The inventory includes retrieved pages and failures; checksum fields identify captured bytes, not the historical truth of a page. Full source texts remain working evidence and are not reproduced in this deliverable.

Dated original messages anchor the founding chronology. Newsletter reports establish what the organisation publicly reported; subscriptions and reach figures remain attributed. Later official histories, CVs and memoirs help identify roles but can misremember dates. Independent professional reporting demonstrates public visibility. Government records establish a corporation’s filing history, not an active professional network. A website capture can preserve old material, so capture dates and internal dates are separated.

Access limitations remain visible in the catalogue. The PsychiatryOnline 1995 PDF returned 403; indexed passages were available. The FSU historical supplement returned 404, and Brownell’s publisher sample returned generic HTML; indexed excerpts supplied limited evidence. The CiteSeerX poster was inspected through indexed content, not a successfully downloaded PDF. Semantic Scholar returned a rate limit; Scite required a paid subscription. WorldCat, Library Hub and UK Web Archive searches were incomplete or unavailable. Negative results do not prove that these services hold nothing relevant.

Known date conflicts include a later unsupported 1992 foundation claim; March versus April 1994 for the traumatic-stress forum; a 1997 masthead on a PsychNews issue whose contents establish March 1998; and a ResearchGate upload labelled 1995 whose actual editorial is signed December 1997. The source catalogue records these rather than silently choosing search-engine dates.

The 1995 governance confrontation is documented through Robert M. Young’s supportive eyewitness account; Robert G. White’s July 1995 call for elections; Joseph Plaud’s partisan August 1995 account; forum listings of June and December 1995; changes to the newsletter’s masthead; and the New York incorporation record, which establishes the filing date. The November 1994 newsletter shows incorporation was planned by InterPsych’s own committee. No original minutes, vote tallies, account from the administrator or record of legal proceedings was recovered, and the records do not show who authorised the filing or how it related to the dispute. Young’s text does not name its administrator, and no claim from Young or Plaud is attributed to any named person. The later bylaws are not backdated to the confrontation, and the newsletter’s independence is not attributed to it without evidence. No formal legal merger into GlobalPsych, definitive organisational closing date or complete forum-by-forum traffic history was established.

The 30 October 2026 accession began from a separate search report covering original messages, publications, Usenet records, directories, author copies, related projects and graphics. Every link it gave was retrieved on 30 October 2026; status, size and SHA-256 are recorded in the retrieval inventory, each added record was checked for its reference to InterPsych, and the figures used in the narrative were re-checked against the source text. Two sources survive only as archived copies, which are linked instead, and one journal article is linked by DOI rather than through an unofficial copy. One figure in the report was corrected: the 1997 poster prints 113 women and 65 men, one fewer than its 179 respondents. Four MEDLIB-L index pages now require a login and were not added. A trail of documents about Ivan Goldberg's 1995 internet-addiction parody was left out: none of it establishes a connection with InterPsych beyond Goldberg's own role.

Unverified leads are kept out of the catalogue because no relevant passage has been inspected: Kelley-Milburn and Milburn, “Cyberpsych” (*Psychological Science*, 1995); Parkin and Stoker, “Surfing the Net” (*Child Psychology and Psychiatry Review*, 1996); Garson, “News and notes” (*Social Science Computer Review*, 1994); a 1994 notice in *Transcultural Psychiatric Research Review* 31(2); Carbonell and Figley's 1996 methodology paper in *Traumatology*; Barker, Reynolds and Stevenson on psychiatric nursing (1997); Lim, “The Internet: applications for mental health clinicians” (*Psychiatric Services*, 1996); Quinn's 1995 guide to psychology resources on electronic networks; Lukoff, “The mental health Internet” (1999), although his later online course was read; the later editions of Grohol's *Insider's Guide to Mental Health Resources Online*, the 1997 edition having been seen in snippets; and a *Greenwich Social Work Review* article that cites the 1997 compassion-fatigue poster. The American Psychological Association file “JANET NET — Mailbase and Interpsych” of 1 June 1994 and original forum archives also remain unrecovered; several MEDLIB-L messages of August–December 1994 have since been recovered from Usenet copies.

A supplementary search report of 31 October 2026 covered the whole FU Berlin PsychNews archive, Usenet and mailing-list archives, directories and the Internet Archive's full-text index. Every link it cited was retrieved again on 31 October 2026 and recorded in the retrieval inventory. Each of the 179 records added was checked against the retrieved text, or, for 70 books and directories held by the Internet Archive, against full-text-search snippets or OCR text obtained independently; the access field says which. Two pages that refused a scripted request were read in a browser; two catalogue pages behind a bot check were not read. Statements in the report that the retrieved text did not support were corrected or dropped, and two messages that did not mention InterPsych in the retrieved copy were left out. Joseph Plaud's August 1995 message is summarised without the personal characterisations it contains. Five later items that do not mention InterPsych (U174–U178: two press and blog pieces about Pitchford’s later mailing list, two notices concerning *The Human Nature Review* and a memorial of Goldberg) are catalogued for context but not used in the history. The report also listed several hundred further Usenet messages, mostly signature lines, pointer lists, repeated postings and newsletter sections, which were not catalogued individually. It corrected two names in the people index: the early board members listed as “Lance Workman” and “Jim Zimbelman” are Edward Workman and Kirk Zimbelman in the cited source.

Further leads from the 31 October search remain unread: two *Chronicle of Higher Education* resource lists; a Behavior OnLine thread, “Ian Pitchford Hangs It Up”; Giedd, Allen and Behr (1996) on mailing lists for child and adolescent psychopharmacologists; the Internet Scout catalogue records for PsychNews International and *The Human Nature Review*; the 2000 edition of the Association of Research Libraries directory; and several Google Books entries whose snippets were blocked. Lending-library books cited from snippets would reward reading in full, in particular *Mental Health Computing* (1996), whose entry describes a resource founded by Goldberg in 1985 and “merged into InterPsych in 1994”.

A further review log of 31 October 2026 re-audited all 396 records and listed some 170 additional records, about 500 uncatalogued Usenet messages and further leads. Fifteen of its additional records were retrieved again and checked, and are catalogued as V01–V15. Not added: 73 components and wrappers from the FU Berlin archive, already covered by the full crawl; alternative copies of CVs and articles already catalogued; pages seen only in search-engine extracts; pages behind bot checks or no longer available; derivative company-data pages; and polemical web pages that repeat allegations without new evidence. The log's corrections were checked and applied: the U075 thread begins with a repost of 7 July 1996, and the 2005 handbook passage concerns Kwon's mailing lists generally, not only InterPsych's.

Its leads add: InterPsych/PsyComNet classified advertisements in *Psychiatric News*, 1995–97, seen only in search extracts; Dubovsky and Buzan's 1997 *Journal of Clinical Psychiatry* review, reported to mention informal reports from the InterPsych-sponsored psychopharmacology list; Cloos, Olivier and Pull's 1998 French guide; ISSN authority records for both newsletters (1355-2562 and 1366-9869), which are behind a bot check; Barker, Reynolds and Stevenson's 1998 paper, reported to cite Schaler's newsletter column; and Diner's 2020 article in the *Greenwich Social Work Review*, reported to cite the compassion-fatigue poster's InterPsych recruitment with 66 men where the poster gives 65, whose author-hosted copy no longer resolves. The log reports that Quinn's 1995 guide names no InterPsych list.

The New York corporation INTERPSYCH, INC., the voluntary federation, newsletter, domains, host institutions and individual forums are distinct. Their histories overlap but do not end together. The recovered records do not show who authorised the filing or how the board regarded it. Announced projects are separated from outputs actually recovered. Clinical and research activity is described historically; treatment efficacy is not inferred.

AI-assisted researchers collected and compared the evidence, and an internal AI review checked the draft; no external review is claimed. No formal interviews, private archival correspondence, purchases or external outreach were used. The history was commissioned by InterPsych’s founder, Ian Pitchford, a participant in the events described; the evidence is linked so that readers can check the account for themselves. The evidence remains open to further correction by original documents or first-person recollections.