The intended programs

Open Research Commons

This is the reason the Institute is being organized. Three lines of work sit at its center: an open-source mental-health model, independent clinical-validation research, and public safety-evaluation work.

The intent is that its outputs are genuine public goods. The model would be published with open weights and open methods, so researchers and clinicians can inspect the work rather than take a vendor's word for it. The validation research would ask whether these tools do what they say, run by people who do not sell the product, including validation specific to different age groups, since a tool checked in adults is not thereby proven safe or accurate for adolescents or younger people. The safety evaluations would test how mental-health tools behave in hard moments, and share those tests openly so the whole field can learn from them.

This is the program meant to answer a fair question about any company: whether it should be the one grading its own clinical homework. The point of doing this work inside an independent nonprofit is that the answer no longer depends on trusting a single company. Anything forward-looking here is research in development: provisional, honest, and never a diagnosis. See the Open Research Commons →

Access & Resources Fund

This is intended to be the most straightforwardly public-good program. It has two parts.

The first is openly verified crisis-line and resource data: directories of support lines, maintained in the open and free for anyone to use or build on. The second is wider access to mental-health resources for people who cannot pay, so cost is less of a barrier to support.

Both parts are meant to be public by default: openly maintained, openly available, and not gated behind any product.

Open Education

Open, plain-language public education about mental health and about how mental-health technology actually works: explainers, learning resources, and honest guidance on what these tools can and cannot do.

Education is a co-equal focus with the research itself. The aim is that a person does not need a technical background to understand what a mental-health tool is doing, what its limits are, and how to judge claims made about it. This program teaches and informs; it makes no medical claims, and it is not marketing for any product.

Voices of Experience

This program is intended to center people with lived experience of mental illness in how the research and tools get built, rather than treating them as an afterthought.

Its work would be advisory and educational: bringing lived experience into research questions, review, and design decisions, and sharing what is learned so others can build more honestly. The aim is that the people the work is meant to serve have a real voice in shaping it.

Data Dignity

Data Dignity is intended as an oversight function, not a program that solicits anything from anyone. Its job would be to guard how any contributed data could ever be used.

The standard it is meant to hold is deliberately higher than what the law requires: a check on the rest of the Institute's work, so that respect for the people behind any data comes first. It exists to say no, not to gather more.