How this site is written
Editorial standards.
Who pays for this, what would make a page change, and the conflict that exists — stated before anybody has to ask.
Independence, in both directions
No clinic, hospital group, broker, fellowship or medication provider pays for anything here. No referral fee, commission, finder's fee, retainer, advertising, sponsorship, affiliate arrangement or hospitality has ever been accepted from any of them, and none will be. There is no arrangement under which a clinic can appear on this site, improve how it is described, or have a description removed. No clinic is named as the best one, and none is named in a way that could be read as a recommendation: types, not brands.
The site is funded by network membership, which is bought and managed by the console at contented.guide. That is the whole commercial relationship, and it is with the reader rather than with the industry this site describes.
The membership model, plainly
Membership is live. It is one membership across the network, held at the console rather than on this site, and what it buys is continuity: the SI guide keeps the thread of what you have worked out across sessions instead of starting from nothing every time.
No price is published anywhere on this site, by the pages or by the guide, in any currency. The current price is shown on the join page and nowhere else, because a price written into a website is a price that drifts and a stale price is a promise nobody meant to make. Any page or reply claiming to know what this costs is not authorised.
The pages are free and stay free. Safety routes are free. Crisis routing is never paywalled, never shortened, and never counted against an allowance, and nothing commercial is shown to a visitor who is drunk, ashamed, frightened, mid-crisis or being admitted in the morning. There are no tiers, no upsells and no advertising.
The declared conflict
James was a paying patient at Delamere, in Cheshire, in June 2020. That admission is the origin of everything on this site, and it is a conflict, so it is declared wherever it could matter. That clinic gets no favourable treatment here: it is not named as the best, it is not compared with others, and it appears on this site only as the place one admission happened. Nobody at any clinic has seen a page before publication or been given a right of reply into the text.
What this site will not publish
Doses, tapers, detox schedules, or anything else that could be followed instead of seeing a doctor. Named recommendations of one clinic over another. Success rates, which in this industry are almost never independently verified. Before-and-after stories used as persuasion. Photographs or identifying detail of other patients — the cohort in my four weeks were not consulted about a website and are owed their privacy permanently.
Nothing typed into the chat is ever reused as content: not as an example, not anonymised, not in a talk, not as “a question I was once asked”. Confidentiality is the standard, and the chat does not become material.
Where the detail comes from, and where it stops
The week-by-week account is lived experience, recorded as one person's account and attributed as such rather than presented as evidence. It describes a British admission in 2020, and the pages say so: programmes move, practice varies between clinics and between countries, and the details readers most want fixed — phones, cards, visits, cigarettes, food, time outside — are exactly the details that vary. Where something is genuinely not known, this site says it is not known.
Clinical statements are kept to what national clinical guidance and national health service information already say plainly. Medication and blood markers are named only where a discharge letter would name them, and never with a dose. The site is about alcohol; it does not cover other drugs, and it says so rather than generalising, because withdrawal and overdose risks differ by substance.
Corrections
If something here is wrong it gets changed rather than defended, on the page where the error is, within seven days of being shown to be wrong. If a clinic disputes a description, the response is published on the page it concerns rather than folded into a quiet edit. Corrections can be raised through the guide or through the contact route at contented.guide.
How the SI guide is governed
The guide runs on a written brief that sets out what it may and may not say. It may not diagnose, rate severity, instruct a detox, name a best clinic, quote a price for anything, tell anybody they are an alcoholic, or claim to be James. It states that it is an SI in its first line. It asks where a visitor is before answering anything that depends on the country, and it says which country a figure comes from.
A separate safety check runs on every message. Where it fires, the ordinary conversation stops and the safety routes are given instead — general routes, never a telephone number, because this site is read in several countries. The safety page is where those routes are set out, and what this desk refuses is the rest of the ledger.