Built With Lived Experience

PsychPal was co-designed by someone who has been on the other side of the screen.

Lived and living experience of mental health is not a marketing line for us — it is the foundation of every decision in the product, from the wording of a check-in prompt to the safeguards behind a crisis-detection lock.

The Founder's Lived Experience

PsychPal's founder, Jules Poiron, has navigated personal mental-health challenges and has drawn on that lived experience throughout the design of this product. The everyday realities of waiting for an appointment, feeling unsafe to share with a stranger, hitting a 2 a.m. wall when no service is open, and not being able to afford ongoing private therapy are not abstractions to us — they are the design constraints PsychPal was built to address.

That perspective informed three core commitments that have shaped the product from day one:

Available when it's hard. The AI companion is designed to meet users in the late night, the cancelled-session moment, the post-argument crash — the times that matter most and that traditional services often cannot cover.
Honest about what it is. PsychPal is positioned as a wellness and journaling companion — not a replacement for clinical care. Every onboarding flow, disclaimer, and crisis pathway is written by someone who has had to ask for real help and knows the difference.
Safe by default. Privacy controls, the multi-tier Safety & Crisis Protocol, and the right to pause, export, or delete your data exist because the founder wanted those things from the platforms he used and rarely got them.

We share this generically and respectfully. Lived experience is real and ongoing, and the team continues to learn and adjust as the product grows.

How Lived Experience Shaped PsychPal

Tone & language of the AI companion

Prompts and responses were rewritten dozens of times to remove clinical jargon, avoid invalidating language (`have you tried…`, `just`, `at least`), and to model what a non-judgemental friend with training would actually say at 2 a.m.

The 3-tier Safety & Crisis Protocol

Designed with the intent that escalation should feel like care, not punishment. The Concern tier offers gentle de-escalation, the Specific and Mass tiers add a 90-second user-controlled opt-out window before any external contact is made, and a human always reviews the incident afterwards.

Therapist-Partner Network

Built so that a user is never told `here is a list, good luck.` Partner therapists are matched on realistic logistics — language, modality, sliding-scale availability — that lived-experience users actually need to know before booking.

Privacy as a felt experience

Encryption, Canadian data residency, audit logs, and the right to export or delete are explained in plain English on the Privacy-First page — because the founder, as a user, wanted to actually understand where his data went, not skim a 30-page contract.

Inactivity reminders that respect agency

Reminders trigger when a user stops journaling, not when they stop opening the app. Lived experience taught us that the difference between `I forgot` and `I'm spiralling` matters, and the product should not nag — it should notice.

Our Ongoing Co-Design Commitments

In line with the Mental Health Commission of Canada's framework on lived & living experience (Domain 5), PsychPal commits to the following on an ongoing basis:

Lived experience is represented at the decision-making level. The founder, who has lived experience, is directly accountable for product, safety, and clinical-partnership decisions.
User feedback is treated as design data. Every in-app feedback submission is reviewed and tagged. Recurring themes are converted into roadmap items and credited (anonymously) in our changelog.
Pilot programs include lived-experience review. Future pilot studies (n=30, 8 weeks) and partnership pilots will include a lived-experience advisory step before launch and a debrief after.
Clinical partners review the safety pathway. Our Therapist-Partner advisors are invited to review crisis-protocol updates before they ship, ensuring lived experience is balanced with current clinical best practice.
We are transparent about limits. PsychPal is a wellness companion. Where lived experience tells us a user needs more than we can offer, the product is built to say so and to hand off respectfully.

We welcome partnerships with lived-experience organizations and peer-support groups who want to co-design future features with us. Please reach out to psychpal@outlook.com.

If you are reading this and recognize yourself in any of it — you are not alone, and you are the reason this product exists.