Editorial Policy

Who writes it

Every lesson is written and edited by René, who lives with bipolar disorder and spent twenty-five years being treated for something else before it was named. He is not a doctor and has never claimed to be. He chooses the topics, writes each lesson, and checks it against the sources before it goes out. He stays off camera; his first name is the whole of what you get.

How we use AI — and how we don’t

Clara, our on-screen presenter, is an AI. The face and the voice are synthetic. We say so on every video and on every page, because you should never have to work that out for yourself.

What AI does here: it presents, and it helps with drafting, translation and checking. What it does not do: decide what this site says. Every lesson is written, chosen and approved by a person who lives with this condition, and nothing is published that he has not read. If that ever changes, this paragraph changes first.

How we research

We write from named sources — the clinical guidelines and reference works psychiatry actually uses: NICE, NIMH, CANMAT, the WHO, the DSM-5-TR and the ICD-11 — together with peer-reviewed research and established clinical books such as Miklowitz’s The Bipolar Disorder Survival Guide. Every claim is checked against them before publication, not afterwards, and each article lists its sources so you can check them yourself.

How we review

Each lesson is checked against its sources before publication, claim by claim — not after. Anything that names a boundary, a risk, or a route to help is treated as fixed text: it is written once, checked, and not reworded by later edits.

Where a lesson touches medication, pregnancy, psychosis or risk, the review is stricter and slower. We would rather publish late than publish a sentence somebody could act on wrongly.

When the evidence is thin

Where the evidence is uncertain, we say so instead of rounding it up. Where a study shows an association, we write “associated with”, not “causes”. Where a number would be misread more often than understood, we leave it out — a figure nobody can interpret is not information.

We also do not turn group findings into predictions about you. No page here can tell you what will happen in your case, and none will pretend to.

What we don’t do

Nothing here will ever tell you to start, stop, restart, taper, switch or combine a medication. That decision belongs to you and the person who prescribes for you — always, and without exception.

We don’t diagnose, we don’t assess anyone’s risk, and we don’t give personalised medical advice. We’re preparation for the appointment, not a replacement for it.

Safety

We follow safe-messaging principles for mental-health content: no method detail, no graphic description, no sensationalism, and a clear route to help wherever it could be needed.

Crisis routes are researched country by country, not translated from one. A helpline that works in the United States is of no use to somebody reading in Hindi or Korean. See Get Help Now.

Nine languages

Everything is published in English, Spanish, Portuguese, French, Italian, German, Hindi, Japanese and Korean. Translation is for sense, not word for word: what has to survive is what a sentence does — the reassurance, the boundary, the permission to stop.

Hindi, Japanese and Korean have been reviewed by native speakers, and their corrections are kept in a living glossary that later work has to follow. If something reads badly in your language, that is worth telling us — those reviews have caught real errors.

Corrections

If you spot something inaccurate, please tell us at bipolarclarity@gmail.com with “Correction” in the subject. We fix it, and we say what changed — a silent edit is not a correction. Each article shows a “last updated” date.

Corrections from clinicians and from people living with this are the most useful messages we get.

Independence & funding

Bipolar Clarity currently earns nothing. We use no affiliate links, sell no advertising, and have no sponsors — it is funded out of René’s own pocket. YouTube may show ads around our videos, but we are not in their partner programme and receive none of that money. If any of this ever changes, we will say so here first. Either way, recommendations are made on merit and we stay neutral about your treatment choices.