Short version. Every clinical page on DepressionResource.org is written and reviewed by a board-certified psychiatrist. AI tools are used only for narrow, non-clinical assistance, and never to generate, draft, or finalize clinical claims. Nothing on this site is published from AI output without a human author and a human medical reviewer signing off on it.
What we don't use AI for
- Clinical claims. No statement about diagnosis, treatment, prognosis, medication, dosing, side effects, interactions, or screening interpretation is drafted by AI. Those are written by the editor against current clinical guidelines and peer-reviewed literature.
- Citations. No source citation, study link, or guideline reference is added by AI. Citations are added by the editor from primary sources listed on the Sources and Evidence page. We don't trust AI-generated citations, which are well known to fabricate references.
- Medical review. The medical review step described on the Medical Review Process page is performed by a licensed clinician, not by software. AI doesn't sign off on pages.
- Author identity. No byline, author bio, or reviewer credit on this site is fabricated, composite, or AI-generated. Bylines name real, verifiable people.
- Reader responses. When a reader emails support@depressionresource.org, the response is written by a person. We don't run a chatbot, automated reply, or AI triage on reader email.
Where AI assistance may be used
AI tools are used in narrow, non-clinical ways that don't alter the meaning of clinical content:
- Copy editing for plain language. Editor-written drafts may be passed through an AI editor for suggestions on readability, sentence length, or word choice. Suggestions are reviewed and accepted, modified, or rejected by the editor. The editor remains responsible for every word on the page.
- Outline and structure. AI may suggest an outline or a heading order for a topic, which the editor then writes from scratch using primary sources. No drafted prose, statistics, or citations from those outlines are kept verbatim.
- Search, summarization, and retrieval inside our own source library. AI may be used to find a passage inside a guideline document the editor has already selected (for example, "where does NICE NG222 discuss treatment-resistant depression"). The clinical content of the guideline is read and interpreted by the editor, not summarized into the page by AI.
- Alt text drafts and image captions. AI may draft alt text for editorial images, which the editor then reviews for accuracy and accessibility.
- Code, design, and site operations. Engineering, layout, and accessibility code on the site may be authored with AI assistance. These tools don't touch published clinical text.
What this means for the reader
If you read a clinical claim on this site, you can rely on the fact that a board-certified psychiatrist authored or reviewed it, that it's traceable to a source on the Sources and Evidence page, and that it carries a last-reviewed date set by a person. If you find a passage you suspect is inaccurate, AI-generated, or unsupported by the cited source, please send the URL and the specific passage to corrections@depressionresource.org. The full procedure is on the Corrections Policy page.
Disclosure when AI is part of a workflow
Where AI assistance is used in a way that touches what readers see (for example, an alt-text draft, a plain-language pass on an existing paragraph), the editor reviews the output before it's published. We don't tag individual sentences as "AI-assisted" because the editor is responsible for the published wording regardless of which drafting tools helped get there. If a page is ever produced or published primarily from AI output, we'll disclose that on the page and won't rely on it as clinical content.
AI training and scraping
Independent of how we use AI internally, third parties aren't permitted to scrape DepressionResource.org or to train AI models on its content without a written license. This restriction is part of the Terms of Use and applies to all crawlers, agents, and automated retrieval systems regardless of stated purpose.
Changes to this policy
We update this policy when our internal tools or workflows change. The current version is dated at the bottom of this page. Material changes will be flagged on the site.
Contact
Questions about this policy can be sent to editor@depressionresource.org.
Please do not include medical history, symptoms, or other protected health information in email. Email is not a secure channel and is not monitored for clinical purposes.