About ShrinkDaily
ShrinkDaily is an educational project created under the direction of Shariq Refai, MD, MBA, board-certified psychiatrist. It's designed to help people understand evidence-informed concepts related to the mind, behavior, emotion, learning, decision-making, performance, and recovery. It's not medical advice, diagnosis, treatment, psychotherapy, or emergency care. Use of this website doesn't create a doctor-patient relationship.
What we're really building
ShrinkDaily is closer to a board-certified psychiatrist's atlas of human functioning than to a typical mental health blog. Few resources try to integrate psychiatry, psychology, neuroscience, behavioral medicine, learning science, decision science, systems science, organizational psychology, and human performance into one coherent, scientifically grounded, clinically informed map. That integration is the point.
How it's built
Each concept is a canonical knowledge object: it exists once, carries an evidence label, connects to related concepts, and is reviewed under the direction of Dr. Refai. The website renders those objects. The same objects can power daily lessons, frameworks, pathways, newsletters, and future learning tools.
The daily learning layer of the Shrink Network
ShrinkDaily has one job in the network, and it does it on purpose. Shrinkopedia explains mental health topics in depth. Shrinktionary explains the language. PsychiatryRx explains medication. ShrinkDaily turns evidence-informed concepts into a daily learning habit. It's the layer you visit every morning, not the encyclopedia you open when something is wrong.
The Shrink Concept System
The thing that makes this hard to copy is the system underneath it. Every concept carries a concept ID, a realm, a library, an evidence level, a plain-English lesson, a one-line insight, a reflection prompt, a practical step, related concepts, a related framework, a pathway, and routing to the rest of the network. Anyone can write a mental health tip. A structured, psychiatrist-directed concept graph is a different kind of thing, and it gets more valuable as it grows.
How the realms fit together
The Atlas is organized into six realms: Thinking, Feeling, Becoming, Connecting, Performing, and Recovering. Together they cover how a person thinks, manages emotion, grows and changes, relates to others, performs under pressure, and recovers from stress. Every concept lives in exactly one of them, so the whole map stays navigable as it grows.
Who reviews it
Content is created and reviewed under the direction of Shariq Refai, MD, MBA, a board-certified psychiatrist. The standard is simple: evidence-informed, clinically responsible, and honest about what's settled and what isn't. When something is a teaching model rather than a settled finding, we say so.
About Dr. Refai
Founded by Shariq Refai, MD (shrinkMD), a board-certified psychiatrist. Dr. Refai practices at shrinkMD, the network's clinical care layer, which is where readers who want evaluation, prescription, or ongoing care can begin. ShrinkDaily's editorial standards and clinical review are held to the same bar as the practice itself, and the two are operationally separate.
Selected media
Dr. Refai's perspective has been featured and quoted in the press, including:
- The Epoch Times, on research-backed natural approaches to depression
- Top Doctor Magazine, feature interview: "Mental Health Does Not Discriminate"
- The Primary Care Companion for CNS Disorders (peer-reviewed), authored: "Priapism Associated With Rapid Increase in Risperidone"
- Medstory Studio podcast interview: "The Mental Health Emergency No One Can Escape" (also on Apple Podcasts)
- Shrink Wrapped with Dr. Refai, video series on Doctors on Social Media
- Florida Top Docs, approved provider (also 2026 and 2024)
- EatingWell, on how stress affects the gut
- DomesticShelters, on isolation as a tactic of control
- Top Doctor Magazine, an interview on mental health
Professional identifiers
You can verify Dr. Refai through ORCID 0009-0009-1090-4373, Wikidata Q139822307, and the NPI registry, number 1467680660.
Last reviewed July 13, 2026 by Shariq Refai, MD, MBA. We review every page on this site each quarter, including the legal and safety pages.