The care guidelines recommend — and how often it's missed in practice.

Why this exists

Modern psychiatry runs on guidelines — clear statements of what good care looks like. Check blood sugar when someone takes an antipsychotic. See a patient within a week of leaving the hospital. Give an antidepressant a fair trial before calling it a failure. These aren’t controversial. They’re the field’s own rules.

We took millions of de-identified U.S. psychiatric records and measured, step by step, how often those recommendations are met. The pattern was consistent: a lot of recommended care doesn’t make it into the visit — not because of bad clinicians, but because the system around them is stretched thin, with no one keeping the checklist.

Clinicians are carrying impossible caseloads; the point isn’t that any one of them fell short, it’s that good care shouldn’t depend on nobody dropping the ball. So we wrote the checklist down, in plain language, and pointed it at the one person with the most reason to care: you. Every item below is something you can ask about. None of it tells you to change your treatment — that’s always a conversation with your own clinician. It just helps you walk in knowing what to ask for.