Medical disclaimer
Medical disclaimer
Everything on this website is educational. None of it is medical advice for you personally, and none of it replaces seeing a doctor.
That line sits at the foot of every page here. This page explains what it actually means, because a disclaimer nobody reads protects nobody.
Why a website cannot treat you
A consultation is not the delivery of information. It is a doctor sitting with you, taking a history, asking the follow-up question your first answer made necessary, knowing what else is wrong with you and what you are already taking, and noticing the thing you did not mention.
A page cannot do any of that. It does not know your age, your history, your other conditions, your medication, or which of the several things that look alike from a distance you actually have.
Psychiatric conditions overlap heavily, and a number of them are imitated by physical illness — thyroid disease, vitamin deficiency, infection, the effects of alcohol or other substances, side effects of medication prescribed for something else. Telling these apart is the work. It cannot be done by reading.
What this site can do is help you understand what you might be looking at, take some of the fear out of it, and put better questions in your hand before an appointment. That is genuinely useful. It is not treatment.
Please do not do these things
Do not diagnose yourself or a family member from anything here. Recognising your own experience in a description is common and is not the same as having the condition.
- Do not start, stop, or change the dose of any psychiatric medication because of something you read here. Stopping some psychiatric medicines suddenly is genuinely dangerous. If you want to stop, that is a reasonable thing to want — take it to the doctor who prescribed it, and if that conversation feels impossible, take it to a different doctor.
- Do not delay getting help because a page here made something sound manageable.
- Do not read a description of the law as legal advice. Where this site describes the Mental Healthcare Act, 2017 or other legislation, it describes it in general terms. Specific situations need a clinician or a lawyer.
You will not find medicine names or doses here
This is deliberate, and people sometimes find it frustrating, so here is the reasoning.
Publishing drug names and doses produces two predictable results: people take medication that was never meant for them, and people compare their prescription to something they read and quietly stop taking it. Both cause real harm.
What you will find instead is how classes of treatment work, what to expect from them, how long they take, and what to ask about your own prescription. That is the part that is safe to publish and useful to know.
About the case examples
Some articles use case examples to make an explanation land. Every one is fictional and composite — assembled from patterns seen across many people, never drawn from an identifiable patient. Each is labelled as such where it appears.
If a vignette resembles your situation, that is because the patterns are common. It is not you.
Who writes this and who checks it
Every page is written or reviewed by a named psychiatrist and carries a review date. How sources are chosen and how errors are corrected is set out in the editorial policy.
Medicine changes. Guidelines are revised, evidence shifts, helpline numbers get reorganised. Pages here are reviewed quarterly, but a page can still be out of date on the day you read it. If something here contradicts what your own doctor has told you about your own case, your doctor has information about you that this website does not. Ask them.
Errors
If you think something here is wrong, tell us at dr.mukteshdaund@gmail.com . Substantive corrections are made openly and noted on the page.
In an emergency
Tele-MANAS — 14416 (or 1800-891-4416). Free, 24 hours, in Marathi, Hindi and English. Emergency services — 112. Do not use this website, or any website, to manage an emergency.