The principle we work from
Talking about suicide is allowed here. Nobody is blocked, suspended, restricted, or cut off for saying they are struggling, for describing a past attempt, or for admitting they want to die. A wellness product that punishes disclosure teaches people to hide, and hiding is the thing that kills them.
So every safety measure below adds something — a resource, a check-in, a human review. None of them takes the conversation away.
What happens when someone shows risk
1. Every message is screened
Messages are checked automatically for signs of suicide and self-harm risk before Wellzy replies. This happens for everyone, on every message, in text and in voice.
2. A second check decides what kind of risk it is
An automated score cannot tell the difference between someone in danger tonight and someone describing an attempt they survived a decade ago. Both matter; they need different responses. So flagged messages go to a second classifier that distinguishes between:
- Current suicidal or self-harm intent — a wish to die, a plan, means, a timeframe.
- Present hopelessness about your own life continuing — wanting to not exist, feeling others would be better off without you.
- Past experience being processed — an attempt or a period of self-harm being recalled, not felt now.
- Concern about someone else.
- Danger from another person — being threatened, hurt, or kept unsafe by someone else.
The first two trigger a crisis referral. When the classifier is uncertain between categories, it is instructed to choose the more serious one.
The distinctions matter in both directions. Despair aimed at a job, an illness, an injury or at this app is not the same as despair about being alive, and treating them alike means handing people a suicide hotline when they were talking about something else. And when the danger is coming from another person, the right resource is the National Domestic Violence Hotline (1-800-799-7233), not 988 — unless you are also at risk from yourself, in which case both apply.
3. Crisis resources are guaranteed, not hoped for
Wellzy's instructions tell it to respond with care and to include the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline in that first reply. Instructions are not guarantees, and AI safeguards are known to weaken over long conversations. So the reply is checked before it is sent: if crisis resources are missing, the system adds them.
We record whether the resources came from the model or had to be added, because a rising number of additions is how we would find out that our safeguards are decaying.
4. Method and means information is refused
Wellzy will not provide lethal doses, methods, heights, fatal drug combinations, or access details for dangerous locations. This holds regardless of how the question is framed — "hypothetically", "for a friend", "for a story", "for research". If a generated reply is found to contain that kind of content, it is replaced before it reaches the user.
5. We do not repeat the hotline at you every turn
Once crisis resources have been given, Wellzy stays with the conversation rather than answering every subsequent message with the same phone number. For hopelessness without stated intent, the added crisis block is not repeated within the same day of an ongoing conversation. When someone expresses current intent to harm themselves, the resources are re-shared sooner. Being handed a hotline instead of a response is its own way of being dismissed.
6. You can ask Wellzy to stop sending the hotline — with one exception
If you explicitly ask Wellzy to stop sending crisis-hotline numbers, we honor that request: for signals of hopelessness without stated intent, the added crisis block is paused for 30 days, and asking again renews it. Wellzy will still pay attention and check in on how you are really doing, in its own words. The exception — which Wellzy states to you at the moment you ask: if you express thoughts of harming yourself or wanting to die, it will still share 988 in that reply. That part cannot be turned off. Your request is recorded, in your own words, so that it can be honored reliably and so a person can review that we handled it properly.
7. A person reviews it
Every crisis referral creates a record that Wellzy staff review: what was said, how Wellzy answered, and whether the person actually received crisis resources. Reviewers can only mark how well it was handled. There is no outcome of that review that restricts the user's account.
