How this site is written
Editorial standards.
So that a reader, a journalist, a clinician or a regulator can see the rules in one place. If a page here breaks one of them, that is a mistake rather than a policy, and it gets fixed.
Independence
No treatment provider pays for anything on this site. No referral fee, commission, finder's fee, retainer, advertising, sponsorship, affiliate arrangement or hospitality has ever been accepted from a clinic, a detox unit, a broker, a fellowship or a medication provider, and none will be. There is no arrangement under which a clinic can appear here, improve its position here, or have criticism removed. A provider named anywhere on this site has not paid to be named, and a provider missing from it has not refused to pay.
That matters more on this subject than on most. A relapse is the moment the treatment industry is most interested in a person, and the writing that reaches him at that hour is usually paid for by somebody who wants a bed filled.
How it is funded, and what that pays for
The site is funded by network membership, which is bought and managed at the network console at contented.guide. That is the whole commercial relationship, and it is with the reader rather than with the industry this site writes about. No price for it appears on this site, in this repository, or in anything the AI guide says: the price lives on the join page and is read live from the payment processor there, because a figure written into a page is a figure that drifts into a promise nobody meant to make.
The previous version of this site sold a one-off unlock through a third-party merchant under regional price tiers, with a refund route through a personal telephone number. None of that is the model any longer, and every trace of it has come out: no timers, no tiers, no unlock cookie, no countdown, no urgency, and no personal number published anywhere.
A daily allowance of conversation is complimentary on every guide in the network. Safety replies are never counted against it, and nothing commercial is ever shown to a visitor who is drunk, ashamed, frightened or mid-slip. That is structural rather than generous: this is the site people reach in the worst hour, and mentioning money then would be the end of the point of it.
No telephone numbers, and why
This site publishes no telephone numbers at all — not an emergency number, not a crisis line, not a helpline, and not a number for James. The old version of this page carried a wall of numbers for forty-one countries, identical across six sites, last checked at a date that had already passed.
A number that has changed, or that belongs to the wrong country, is worse than no number, and a visitor at four in the morning has no way of telling which he is looking at. So the safety page describes routes instead: your local emergency number, urgent medical care, a doctor, a local crisis line, a domestic abuse service. The AI guide does the same, and asks which country you are in before it says anything that depends on it.
Reference material is kept once
This site used to republish nine long reference articles — withdrawal, medication, the fellowships, residential against outpatient, rehab brokers, what helps a family — which were the same articles, word for word, as those on two sister sites. Duplicate reference pages age at different speeds, and a reader who finds two versions of a clinical page cannot tell which one was corrected.
So the reference section is now written and maintained in one place: the encyclopedia on sober.guide, the guide in this network for the moment before a man decides what to do about his drinking. It is free and it is not behind anything. Where this site needs that level of detail, it links there once and says what is on the other end. This site keeps only what is genuinely its own: the day after a slip.
What this site will not publish
Detox instructions, doses, tapering schedules, timetables, or anything else that could be followed instead of seeing a doctor — including the advice to keep drinking to level out. A named recommendation of one clinic over another. Success rates, which in this industry are almost never independently verified. A price for anything at another provider, quoted as though it were current. Before-and-after stories used as persuasion. A day count treated as a score. Anything that uses another person's relapse as a device for making a point.
Nor an invented fact: not a clinic, a telephone number, a price, an admissions criterion, a clinical lead, a regulator registration, a waiting time or a statistic. Where a number is not known, this site says it is not known.
Where the facts come from
Clinical statements are kept to what national clinical guidance and national health service information already say plainly, and they are linked where possible — NICE, NHS clinical pages, the Royal College of Psychiatrists, the regulators, and peer-reviewed literature, in roughly that order of weight. Charity-sector research is used and named. First-person experience is labelled as first-person experience and never presented as evidence.
James's material is attributed to him and presented as observation. Where guidance disagrees with itself, which happens, the page says so rather than picking the tidier answer. Figures about what other people charge are ranges, dated in the text, and are a snapshot of a market that moves rather than a quote from anybody.
Declared conflict
James Roberts was a paying patient at Delamere, a residential treatment centre in Cheshire, in June 2020. That is the origin of this work and it is a conflict, so it is declared wherever it could matter. That centre receives no favourable treatment here, is not named as the best, and is not compared on anything other than the same basis as any other. He has no equity, ownership, board seat, advisory role or paid position at any treatment facility, broker or referral business, and no current paid role at any addiction-related organisation. He ran a headhunting firm in travel and hospitality until 2020, and ran Casa Salvia, a guest house in Tenerife, until its recent sale; a number of guests there were in recovery, and no clinical or commercial relationship with any provider arose from it. Casa Salvia is sold and is never offered to anybody here as a place to stay.
If any of that changes, this page changes with it, and says so at the top.
Corrections, and who writes this
Every page here is written or edited by James Roberts. There is no anonymous staff and there are no ghostwriters. AI assistance is used in drafting and research, and every page is read line by line by a named human before it is published.
If something here is wrong it gets changed rather than defended, on the page where the error was. Anything material — a clinical statement, a figure, a claim about a provider — is corrected within seven days of being shown to be wrong, and a significant correction carries a dated note. Raise it through the guide, or through the contact route at contented.guide. That applies to facts, not to judgements, which you are welcome to disagree with.
How the AI guide is governed
The guide runs on a written brief that sets out what it may and may not say, and that brief is the same document this page describes. It may not diagnose, rate how bad a slip was, instruct a detox, name a best clinic, quote a price for anything, moralise about drinking, count days, or tell anybody he is an alcoholic.
A separate safety check runs on every message. Where it fires — withdrawal, crisis, overdose, somebody who cannot be woken, abuse in the home, a child at risk, a medical emergency — the ordinary conversation stops and the safety routes are given instead, never shortened, never counted against an allowance, and never accompanied by anything commercial. It is written about alcohol: where another drug comes up, the guide says the thinking transfers and the medical facts do not, and sends that part to a doctor.
The guide is an AI and it can be wrong. It says so on every page it appears on.