How we work

Editorial policy

Health content about OCD gets read at hard moments, by people making real decisions. These are the rules every Conicia page follows so you can check what you read here.

Who creates and reviews

Every Conicia article is created and clinically directed by Weston Scott Fisher, MD, a psychiatrist who has focused on treating obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) for over a decade, and he medically reviews each one before it publishes, with a visible last-reviewed date. The creator and the reviewer are the same person. Drafts are prepared with editorial and AI assistance (see How we use AI), and Dr. Fisher's clinical review governs what the library says.

Pages that touch the highest-stakes topics (harm-themed OCD, postpartum intrusive thoughts, suicidality) receive Dr. Fisher's line-by-line review and carry a crisis line.

How claims are sourced

Articles cite sources you can check, and statistics link to the source they come from, not to another blog. When evidence is still maturing, the article says so plainly rather than overstating it. When something is Dr. Fisher's clinical judgment, it is presented as exactly that. Wording inside quotation marks is never added, removed, or changed, and punctuation follows our house style.

How we use AI

The full account of the process, in Dr. Fisher's own words, is at How this was made.

We use AI to find the questions people with OCD actually ask, draft articles, and gather current research for citation. It does not decide what we publish. Every article is then reviewed by Dr. Fisher: he challenges the claims, checks them against the evidence and his clinical experience, directs rewrites, and signs off. Nothing goes live without his approval.

We also draw a hard line: AI works behind the scenes here, never between you and the material. There is no chatbot on this site, on purpose. Chatbots are well-shaped for reassurance, which makes them badly shaped for OCD. An answer machine that never tires of the same question can turn into a compulsion with a text box. So we take the benefits of AI without putting its biggest trap in front of you. The pages say what we know, clearly, once. The rest of your time belongs to your life.

Keeping content current

Every published article shows the date it was last reviewed. Articles are re-reviewed, and the review date only updates when a clinician has actually re-read the page.

Independence

Conicia's library carries no third-party advertising, no sponsored content, and no affiliate links. Nobody pays us to be mentioned, and this site uses no trackers and no analytics cookies. The one product these pages point to is our own: Conicia is a step-by-step program for understanding OCD, those mentions are labeled, and every article stands on its own without them.

Who this content is for

Conicia and its library are written for adults 18 and over. The content is educational and is not a substitute for diagnosis, assessment, or treatment by a licensed clinician. If you are looking for help for a child or teenager, the International OCD Foundation maintains resources for families of younger people.

Corrections

If something on this site is wrong, tell us and we will fix it. Corrections that change the meaning of a page are noted on the page itself. Write to support@conicia.com.