Anxiety isn’t a mood. It’s your nervous system doing something specific.

No. Therapy is a regulated clinical relationship with a trained professional. Sentral is an educational tool that explains the physiology behind what you are feeling. It does not treat conditions and is not a substitute for professional care.

No. Diagnosis is a clinical act performed by a psychiatrist or other qualified practitioner who has examined you in person. Sentral can describe what is likely happening at a physiological level, and which differential diagnoses fit the pattern. The formal diagnosis comes from a clinician.

CBT teaches you to challenge and restructure your thoughts. Sentral assumes the body has been holding a state — sympathetic activation, an exhausted dominant focus, disturbed neurotransmitter balance — and the thoughts are downstream of that. Sentral starts with the physiology and names the condition only after the mechanism is clear.

ChatGPT is a general-purpose model trained on a vast slice of the internet, including pop psychology and self-help. Sentral runs on a focused corpus: classical psychiatry (Pavlov, Sapolsky, Jaspers, Bleuler, Kandel) and modern neurochemistry (Stahl). It is built to explain mechanisms, not to comfort or coach.

When you describe what you are feeling, Sentral asks about sleep, energy, attention, and bodily sensations before discussing your thoughts or beliefs. The physiology determines what is cognitively possible — not the other way around. Naming the condition comes only after the mechanism is understood.

Those are tools that exist and can be useful in some contexts. They are not the framework Sentral was built on. Sentral draws from the European psychiatric tradition, which approaches mental states as physiological phenomena with measurable mechanisms. Other tools can co-exist with that frame; they are not part of it.

Your conversations are stored encrypted and tied only to your account. They are not used to train external models. You can export or delete your data from Settings at any time.

No. Sentral is not an emergency service. If you are in crisis or considering self-harm, contact your local emergency number, or one of the following:

• US: 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline
• UK: Samaritans, 116 123
• International: findahelpline.com

No. It is a complement, not a replacement. Sentral can help you arrive at a clinical session with clearer language for what you are experiencing, and a better grasp of the mechanism. The clinical relationship — with a real, accountable person — remains essential.

Sentral can describe these conditions in a clinical, physiological frame, and may help you understand what your psychiatrist is treating. It is not a treatment. Active illness of this kind requires medical management and supervision; Sentral is an adjunct at most.

A small team of engineers and a clinical advisor — a working psychiatrist. Sentral is not an academic project. It is a working product designed to make a body of clinical knowledge accessible to adults who want to understand themselves.

No. Prescription is a clinical act, regulated by law and tied to direct examination. Sentral can describe how a class of medication works at the neurotransmitter level — this is Stahl’s domain — but it cannot recommend or initiate any pharmacological treatment.

Sentral draws from peer-reviewed clinical psychiatry and neurochemistry. Like any tool that explains complex biology in plain language, it simplifies. It will sometimes be wrong, especially in edge cases. If something Sentral tells you contradicts a clinician who has examined you, the clinician is the authority.