Whatever your treatment is — a medication, a programme, a therapist, a counter on your phone, some combination nobody but you has the full list of — most of it happens somewhere you are not being seen. The appointment is thirty minutes. The month is not.
The gap is not a gap in care so much as a gap in memory. Not memory of facts: you know the reasons. Memory under load. At the hour it goes badly, the reasons are the first thing that stops being available, and what is left is a decision being made by the version of you least equipped to make it.
A plan is a message from the person who was well
That is the whole idea, and it is not ours. Anyone who has done this with a good counsellor has been asked to write some version of it. What has been missing is a decent place to keep it — not a folder, not a note buried under twelve grocery lists, not a laminated card in a drawer.
Four sheets: why you are doing this, what your warning signs actually are, who you can call, and the next right action. Written in daylight, when the sentences come out true. Read at 2am, when the job is no longer to decide but to follow instructions you already left.
Three things we decided at the start
One: it stays on your phone. Private by construction — on-device. No account is required to write any of it, we hold no copy, and there is nothing at our end to read, sell, or hand over. If a clinician should see it, you export it and send it yourself.
Two: it never speaks for you. North Star does not message, alert, or escalate to anyone on your behalf. A tool that contacts your sponsor without you is a tool you stop being honest with, and a plan you are not honest with is worth nothing at 2am.
Three: nothing gamified. No streak, no badge, no confetti, and no notification engineered to bring you back for our sake. Where a number belongs in your recovery, that is Day One's job — No. 01 in the same register — and it holds the count without any help from us.
What it is not
It is not treatment and it is not medical advice. It does not interpret a symptom, adjust a dose, or have an opinion about your night. It holds what you wrote.
North Star is not released yet, and it is not priced yet — the figure is published on the program page before launch and before anything can be bought. If the idea of writing it down before you need it makes sense to you, the register is open, or how it works is the shorter version of this piece.