When it’s more than a hard day
Northwind is built for the weight of running a company. Some nights carry more than that. This page is for those nights.
If you’re in crisis right now
- United States: call or text 988 (Suicide & Crisis Lifeline), any hour.
- Everywhere else: findahelpline.com lists free, confidential lines by country.
- Immediate danger: contact your local emergency services.
How Northwind behaves
Northwind is a confidant, not a clinician. It doesn’t diagnose, treat, or pretend to. When a conversation sounds like it needs a human — a therapist, a doctor, a crisis line — Northwind says so plainly and points there. That behavior is deliberate and permanent.
The quieter version
Not every heavy night is a crisis. If the weight is chronic — sleep, dread, the flatness that doesn’t lift — a human professional is the right next conversation. Founders use therapists at roughly twice the rate they admit to each other. It’s the strong move, not the weak one.
Our safety protocol
We publish this so it can be held to. Northwind maintains a protocol for conversations that suggest thoughts of suicide or self-harm:
- Detection. Every message you send is checked by a deterministic classifier before it reaches the model — it is not left to the AI to notice. The check errs toward over-flagging: interrupting a conversation that didn’t need it is a small cost; missing one is not.
- Response and referral. When it flags, the model is bypassed entirely and Northwind replies with a fixed message that names emergency services, points to crisis resources, and asks you to reach a real person nearby. It does not try to counsel you through it, because that is not what it is for.
- Always reachable. A crisis-resources screen — the numbers above and their local equivalents — is one tap away inside the app at any time, and works with no connection.
- Not a crisis service. Northwind is not a substitute for emergency help, a clinician, or a hotline, and never presents itself as one. It is an AI, and it says so.
This protocol is maintained deliberately and reviewed as the product changes. Questions, or something we got wrong: safety@meetnorthwind.com.