Second Aid is designed for the full range of emotional distress, from everyday stress to emergencies. Self-use exercises provide immediate stabilisation, while built-in, one-tap calling to emergency services and national helplines mean urgent human help is never more than a tap away. Its safety model is simple: whatever the level of distress, the right response is immediately accessible from the same place.
Intended Use
Second Aid is intended primarily for immediate stabilisation during emotional distress. Examples include:
- Panic or heightened anxiety.
- Acute stress.
- Emotional overwhelm.
- Temporary difficulty regulating emotions.
- Grief or heartbreak.
- Low mood or loneliness.
- Situations where a person is waiting for additional support.
The immediate objective is emotional stabilisation. This may involve reducing arousal, identifying emotions, restoring composure or determining a manageable next action.
Second Aid can be used independently by individuals who choose to access its exercises. It is not necessary for a user to have a mental-health diagnosis, and the application is not designed to establish one.
Safety Principles
Second Aid complies with IMHI's Mental Health Technology Standards (MHTS), an open public standard defining structural and ethical safeguards for technologies that support emotional and mental states.
Second Aid's principal safety considerations include:
- Clear purpose
- The system provides immediate stabilisation and fast access to emergency help, rather than diagnosis or treatment.
- Independent access
- Users can choose to access support without disclosing their emotional state to another person.
- Clear support pathways
- The interface provides guided exercises and access to additional assistance.
- Escalation
- Helplines and one-tap emergency calling are available at any point, so users never have to rely on self-stabilisation exercises alone.
- Privacy
- Public users are not required to create accounts or provide personal information before receiving support, and are never tracked: zero cookies and no behavioural profiling.
- Stabilisation first
- The core exercise, designed for acute distress, begins with paced breathing before introducing reflection, because a dysregulated mind cannot absorb instruction.
- No dependency engineering
- No streaks, reward loops, artificial urgency or notifications designed to bring users back. The aim is reduced long-term reliance, not habitual return.
- Public accountability
- Anonymous usage data is publicly visible through Open Analytics, with no third-party behavioural data processors.
- Ongoing evaluation
- Real-world feedback and future research can identify usability, accessibility and safety concerns that require attention.
Together, these principles ensure that support is safe to use at the moment someone is most vulnerable, and never at their expense.
Limits of Use
Just as First Aid does not replace a doctor, Second Aid does not replace qualified healthcare professionals, and does not provide psychotherapy, psychiatric treatment, medical assessment or clinical diagnosis. In a life-threatening emergency, its exercises are not the response; instead, the app connects the user directly to emergency services.
Mental-health conditions vary substantially in presentation, severity and individual requirements. An exercise that somebody finds helpful during temporary distress may be inappropriate or insufficient for another person. Second Aid should therefore be understood as a support resource rather than a comprehensive clinical intervention.
As with First Aid, where symptoms are persistent, severe, worsening or interfering significantly with everyday functioning, appropriate professional assessment may be necessary.
Crisis Safeguards
Some situations require immediate intervention beyond self-stabilisation exercises. Examples include imminent risk of suicide or self-harm, threats of violence, a medical emergency, or circumstances in which a person cannot maintain their immediate safety.
Second Aid is designed for these moments too. Emergency numbers are built into the app, so a user can call emergency services in one tap at any point, without completing an exercise or looking up a local number. One-click calls to the national emotional-support helpline, added at the request of doctors, are also provided.
In a crisis, not knowing which number to call can cost time; Second Aid removes that step.
Privacy
Emotional distress is a particularly sensitive context for digital interaction. Users may be reluctant to seek support if doing so requires disclosure, identification or the sharing of personal psychological information. Second Aid is designed to minimise these barriers.
Its public support exercises do not require user accounts or personally identifying information. Privacy is built into the design rather than promised by policy: Second Aid uses zero cookies, no cross-site tracking, no advertising networks and no third-party behavioural profiling, and does not collect personal data from public users.
Users cannot be tracked by design. With zero cookies, no accounts and no personal data collected, there is no persistent identifier to recognise a returning user, follow them across sites or build a profile of their distress.
The service does collect anonymous aggregate activity statistics, such as how many times each exercise is used, without identifying individual users. These aggregate statistics are distinct from personal mental-health records, and are publicly visible on Second Aid's Open Analytics page to help research institutions, governments and therapists monitor and advance mental-health progress worldwide.
Where organisations access licensed reporting, it is important to distinguish aggregate service activity from information about identifiable individuals. The purpose of organisational reporting is to understand service use, not to identify individual employees, students, patients or visitors experiencing distress.
Organisational purchasing requires separate administrative and billing information, which is governed by the applicable privacy policy.
For the current privacy terms, see: https://www.secondaid.com/policies/privacy/
Accessibility
Not every psychological exercise is suitable for every person. Different users may experience breathing instructions, emotional reflection and interactive exercises differently. Some individuals may find a breathing exercise uncomfortable, physically demanding or anxiety-provoking.
The Help Me Calm Down™ evaluation identified user feedback describing breathing demands that felt overwhelming and pacing that felt too rapid. These reports are relevant safety and accessibility signals. They reinforce the importance of clear instructions, allowing users to stop exercises, and providing alternative support routes where an exercise is unsuitable.
Accessibility is an ongoing design and evaluation requirement rather than something that can be assumed from the availability of an intervention.