Code of ethics

The below guidelines form our code of ethics, intended to help ensure that clear communication and care for our contributors and community are central to everything we do.

As Neurotopical progresses, we’ll probably think of more things that need to be added to this document! If there’s anything major that is added, we’ll post an update with a link to the new version.

Duty of care

Contributors

No one participating in Neurotopical should ever be made to discuss something they are not comfortable with, which includes:
- Disclosure of their own private circumstances and conditions which they would not like to make public.
- Discussion of material that directly relates to their personal triggers.
Contributors are welcome to respond to community commentary (on social media or elsewhere) on their or other contributor’s content, but they are not expected to do so. And if they choose not to engage in a conversation, they are not expected to explain why. We all only have so many spoons, and they are under no obligation to respond to strangers about their personal situation.
Contributors are welcome to (and encouraged to!) block or mute anyone who contacts them in ways that make them uncomfortable. Neurotopical will never make a judgement about someone based on their block list.
Contributors are not required to “prove” they have a particular mental health issue to the general Neurotopical community, or disclose their full list of mental or physical health conditions unless they explicitly choose to.
All contributor content should be clear that they are relating their own experiences, experiments, and research, not prescribing a one-fits-all solution. We are only experts about ourselves and our own experiences.

The community

All newsletter articles, podcast episodes, and other significant material must contain warnings for common content triggers. These warnings must be clear and easy to find, but can take whatever form is most appropriate: tags, bolded sentences, verbal warnings, etc.
The only exception to content/trigger warnings is short-form media like tweets, where we would recommend people to mute any trigger words for the entire platform. Also in short-form media generally we’ll be linking to a long form piece of media which would then contain the trigger warnings.
All members of the community are encouraged to block or mute anyone else who makes them uncomfortable. Please don’t hesitate to cultivate a space you are comfortable in online. We are very for exchanging different points of view, but only in circumstances where all involved are consenting. No need to indulge Rando Calrissian when they challenge you uninvited about your personal experience with a mental health issue.

Trust and communication

The right tools for the right conversations

Long-form material will only be shared on appropriate mediums, or put simply; no 100 tweet long threads from us. The reason for this is that short-form platforms like Twitter can remove context from a thread, and this can hamper clear communication. That said, rather than dictate an exact number of maximum tweets in a thread, this is a more ‘keep this in mind and use your common sense’ thing.

Transparency

Any noteworthy changes to how we run things will be updated in this document, and we'll tweet/update the community when these changes occur.