Terms, licence and sources

Free open teaching material about mental health. It is in English for now, while the Nepali text is under review. It was written for people training to counsel and for anyone who wants to understand the subject. There is no account, no fee, and nothing here tracks who reads it.

It is not medical advice, not legal advice, and not a diagnostic tool. Nothing here tells you what condition you have or what treatment you need. Only a qualified person can do that, and seeing one is the right step if you are struggling.

Every figure on these pages carries the source and the year it comes from. Where a number is modelled by an international body rather than counted in Nepal, the page says so. Where a Nepal figure does not exist, the page says that too, rather than estimating one.

Call 1166, the National Suicide Prevention Helpline at the Mental Hospital in Lagankhel, or 1660 012 1600 at Tuth Hospital. In an emergency call 112 or 100. If a number does not answer, try another, and if someone is in danger now do not wait on a helpline: call 112 or 100. These four numbers are the highest-liability text on the whole site, which is why we verify them against more than one source and why we ask you to tell us if one stops working.

The address in the footer goes to the people who write these pages. Tell us what is wrong and we will read it. We may correct it, we may leave it, and we are not promising to change anything because you asked.

If your message says a child is being harmed, we have to tell the police. The law says anyone who learns of violence or sexual abuse against a child must inform the nearest police, and the law protects the person who does. So a message like that cannot be kept private, even if you ask us to. If someone is in danger now, do not email anyone: call 112 or 100, or 1166.

Our own original material, which means the writing on these pages, the diagrams, the illustrations, the Quick check questions and the Key points, is shared under a Creative Commons Attribution, Non-Commercial, Share-Alike 4.0 licence.

In practice: you may copy it, print it, translate it, and adapt it, including for a classroom, a college, or a translation into another language. You cannot sell it, charge for it, or use it as part of something you sell, and if you adapt it you must pass on the same licence. Credit is required: name Mano Atlas, link to manoatlas.com, and say whether you changed anything.

Some sections adapt teaching material written by other people. That material belongs to its authors, and their terms are the ones that apply to it, not ours. Every contributor, what they gave us, and what terms apply are listed in the credits file, which is linked below and kept with the site source. We have not yet asked the authors what licence they will grant, and until we do, those sections carry no open licence from us. The licence above covers our own writing only.

The scripts, styles and small pieces of JavaScript that assemble this site are under the MIT licence, which is separate from the content licence above and lets anyone reuse the tooling freely.

The atlas name, the logo and the site's own visual identity are not covered by either licence. Please do not republish it as your own.

Some things on these pages stay with their authors. Diagnostic criteria and codes are summarised from DSM-5, which is published by the American Psychiatric Association, and the manual's own wording belongs to them. Books, films and guidelines are named in the reading lists by title. Figures from the national survey, the police and the health ministry, and from the World Health Organization and the Global Burden of Disease, belong to whoever published them, and are reproduced as numbers with attribution rather than as copied text.

Our rule is that any figure we publish is checked against two independent sources, and that both are named. Two articles repeating the same study count as one source, not two.

We are part-way through applying that rule to material published earlier, so we will not claim it is finished. Where a page rests on a single source, the page says so instead of implying a second one. The working ledger that tracks which figure stands where is in the site source, at review/data-ledger.md.

Every contributor, what each of them gave us, and what terms apply to their material is written down in one file, with thanks. It travels with the site source, so it can be read and checked rather than taken on trust.

Read the credits and sources

Four of the teaching decks carry no author name, so we cannot yet thank those writers by name or ask them what licence they want. We would like to fix that.