This page explains how mental-health information on jonathanhaverkampf.com is written, sourced, reviewed, and bounded. It is here so readers can see how the site tries to stay useful, transparent, and safe, while making professional help easy to find when it is wanted.
If You Feel Unsafe Right Now
If you or someone else is in immediate danger, or you cannot stay safe, contact local emergency services or go to an emergency department now. In Ireland, call 112 or 999. Do not wait for a website reply or routine appointment.
If you are in a mental health crisis or having thoughts of suicide or self-harm, seek real-time support from a local crisis service or health professional. The country-specific support routes include crisis and listening services. This site cannot provide crisis care.
What This Site Is For
This site offers free mental health information for people anywhere in the world. It aims to help readers understand what they are experiencing, feel less alone, choose a practical next step and communicate with supportive people and qualified professionals. Information about psychotherapy and counselling services is available separately; access to the free resources does not depend on making an appointment.
The information here is not a substitute for diagnosis, psychotherapy, counselling, emergency care, medical care, medication advice, legal advice, or personalised treatment advice. The fuller site boundary is set out in the Disclaimer.
Who Writes and Maintains the Information
Pages are written and maintained by Dr Jonathan Haverkampf for this professional mental-health website. This is a single-author professional site, not a large media publication with a separate editorial board. For that reason, the site aims to be clear about its limits, careful about claims, and explicit about when readers should seek personal professional help.
Jonathan’s own publications and research routes may be linked where they are genuinely relevant, especially through the Research and Publications hub. They are never used as the only evidence for clinical, medication, diagnostic, crisis, legal, or public-health claims.
How Sources Are Chosen
Mental-health topics can affect real decisions, so high-trust pages are checked against reputable sources where practical. The sources vary by topic, but priority goes to independent public-health bodies, clinical guidelines, peer-reviewed literature, professional organisations, and major health-system explainers.
- For crisis, public-health, access-to-care, and support-route wording: official services such as HSE, NHS, 988, SAMHSA, or equivalent local services are preferred.
- For diagnosis, medication, safety, and treatment topics: clinical guidelines, regulator information, public-health bodies, peer-reviewed literature, and major teaching-hospital explainers are preferred.
- For psychotherapy, counselling, communication, relationships, grief, stress, and self-understanding: clinical guidance and research are combined with careful plain-language explanation.
- For service pages: wording is kept calm and professional, without outcome guarantees, pressure tactics, or claims that a service is right for everyone.
Well researched and useful in everyday life
All mental health tips and suggestions should be well researched and of practical value to readers wherever they live. For new and revised material, this means checking the specific advice against independent, reputable evidence and offering clear, manageable steps, with low-cost or no-cost options where feasible.
Advice should make room for different cultures, languages, disabilities, levels of literacy and access to care. It should not assume that everyone has money, privacy, a safe family or an available therapist. A short resource cannot be a complete treatment, and no suggestion will suit everyone. Country-specific services should be labelled, with international support routes easy to find.
Making room for helpful communication
Helping readers communicate with trusted friends, family, other supportive people and qualified mental health professionals is an important aim of the practical guidance. Where it fits the topic, a resource should offer usable words for beginning a conversation, explaining a need, asking for support or preparing questions for an appointment.
For example: Could you listen for a few minutes? I do not need you to solve this; some company would help.
Or, with a professional: This is affecting my everyday life. Could we discuss what help might fit?
These are optional starting words to adapt, not instructions to disclose.
You choose whom to talk to, when, and how much to share. There is no requirement to retell trauma, reconcile with someone or share personal experiences publicly. If someone is unsafe or controlling, specialist support may be a safer route. Supportive conversation can accompany professional care; it does not replace indicated treatment or emergency help.
For practical independent guidance, see the NHS guide to talking about mental health and NIMH advice on preparing to talk with a health care provider.
Communication is also a longstanding theme of Dr Jonathan Haverkampf’s articles and books. For additional context, read Communication in Psychotherapy and Counselling or the free excerpt from Beginning to Communicate. This related writing complements independent clinical sources; it is not evidence that one approach suits every reader.
How Pages Are Reviewed and Updated
The site is updated by priority. Pages are refreshed when source material changes, when search or reader-interest data suggests a page is being found for a sensitive query, when internal links or routes become stale, or when a topic needs clearer safety boundaries.
Where a page has been substantially reviewed, it may include a visible source/review note. Older pages are being improved over time, especially where they cover symptoms, medication, diagnosis, crisis-adjacent wording, service routes, or high-traffic mental-health questions.
Safety Boundaries
- If you or someone else may be in immediate danger, contact local emergency services. In Ireland, call 112 or 999 or go to an emergency department; the HSE urgent-help page lists further support. For crisis support in the United States, call or text 988; call 911 for immediate danger.
- The site cannot diagnose you. It can help you reflect on patterns and prepare questions, but diagnosis and treatment planning require an appropriate professional assessment.
- Medication questions, including starting, stopping, increasing, reducing, or combining medication, need to be discussed with a qualified prescriber.
- New, severe, persistent, unexplained, or worrying physical symptoms should not be assumed to be anxiety, stress, or another mental-health issue without appropriate medical advice.
- Comments, community areas, contact forms, and email are not psychotherapy, crisis care, or confidential clinical treatment channels.
How Reader Data Informs Improvements
The site uses privacy-conscious aggregate analytics and search data to notice pages that may need clearer wording, better routes, safer boundaries, or more helpful next steps. The Privacy Policy explains data handling in more detail.
Analytics work is not used to identify individual visitors, infer personal diagnoses, or store sensitive visitor details. It is used only at an aggregate level to improve public information, navigation, accessibility, and service discovery.
How To Use The Site
- Start with Mental Health Topics for explanations of anxiety, OCD, depression, trauma, grief, relationships, stress, burnout, and related topics.
- Use Mental Health Help if you are looking for possible next steps or feel unsure where to begin.
- Use the Dublin and online psychotherapy/counselling page, appointment page, or contact page if you are considering personal support.
- Treat each page as a starting point for reflection and discussion, not as personal instruction or diagnosis.
Corrections and Questions
If a factual point, source link, page route, or safety boundary seems unclear or out of date, you can use the contact page to flag it. Please do not send urgent crisis information, highly sensitive personal details, or emergency requests through website forms or email.
Sources and Review Note
The communication and worldwide-support guidance above was added following source checks on 20 October 2026. The wider source framework below was recorded on 13 May 2026. This policy describes the standard for new material and ongoing updates; it does not mean that every older article has recently been reviewed. Condition and treatment pages need their own specific sources and accurate review dates.
- HSE mental-health supports and services and HSE urgent mental-health help.
- NIMH guidance on when mental-health help may be needed.
- NHS mental-health information, NICE guidance, and WHO mental-health topic information.
- 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline for United States crisis-routing context.