A patient & advocate's guide
Psychiatry has a checklist for good care. A lot of it never reaches you.
We compared de-identified records from millions of U.S. psychiatric patients against the field's own guidelines and found 57 recommended care steps that often get missed. Usually it's because the system around your clinician is stretched too thin to track them. This site shows you the checklist, so you know what to ask for.
Nothing you enter leaves your browser. This is information, not medical advice.
How it works
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1
Tell us what applies to you
Check the medicines you take and the situations you're in. It all stays on your device.
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2
See the care steps you're owed
We show you the guideline-backed steps that fit your situation, and how often they get missed.
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3
Bring the questions to your visit
Each card gives you plain questions you can ask. It never tells you to change your treatment on your own.
Why this exists
Good psychiatric care follows guidelines: clear statements of what should happen and when. Check someone’s blood sugar when they start an antipsychotic. See a patient within a week of leaving the hospital. Give an antidepressant a fair trial before deciding it failed. None of this is controversial. It is the field’s own set of rules.
We took millions of de-identified U.S. psychiatric records and measured, step by step, how often those recommended steps actually happened. A lot of them didn’t. Usually that isn’t because a clinician got it wrong. It is because the people doing this work are carrying impossible caseloads, records are scattered across systems, and often nobody is keeping the checklist at all.
So we wrote the checklist down in plain language and handed it to the person who has the most reason to care about it: you. Everything below is something you can ask about at a visit. None of it tells you to change your treatment. That is always a conversation with your own clinician. It just helps you walk in knowing what to ask for.
Start with the big ones
A few of the most common gaps, and the ones that matter most.