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Safety

How Hey Susan handles emergencies, when she nudges you to call a real clinician, and the crisis resources she points to.

If this is an emergency, call 911 (or your local emergency number) right now. If you're having thoughts of harming yourself or your baby, call or text 988 (Suicide & Crisis Lifeline, US & Canada). Hey Susan is not a substitute for emergency services.

What Hey Susan is — and isn't

Hey Susan is an AI assistant for parents. She helps you feel less alone, tracks feeds and diapers, and checks in proactively as your baby grows. She is not a doctor, nurse, therapist, midwife, lactation consultant, or other licensed health professional. She is not a medical device and her responses are not medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. She does not replace your pediatrician, OB/GYN, midwife, or your instincts as a parent.

Everything on this page is about how we keep her useful without pretending she's something she isn't. The shorter legal framing lives at /medical-disclaimer.

The four safety tiers

Every health-adjacent message Susan sends fits into one of four tiers. This is the grammar her code enforces, not a marketing promise.

L0 — Emergency hard-route

When your message contains words that match our emergency list — things like not breathing, unresponsive, seizure, choking, turning blue, bleeding won't stop, or fever in a baby under three months — Susan bypasses the AI entirely and ships a pre-written response telling you to call 911 (or your local emergency number). The language model does not get a vote on whether “baby not breathing” warrants emergency services.

If you tell her you're thinking about hurting yourself or your baby — phrases like want to die, don't want to be here, hurt myself — she routes you to 988 (Suicide & Crisis Lifeline) and flags the conversation for a same-day human check-in.

If you're not in crisis but you're noticing things that feel off — persistent worry, racing thoughts at 3 a.m., feeling unable to rest even when the baby does, a flat numbness that doesn't lift — our reader-facing piece on postpartum anxiety symptoms walks through what the early pattern can look like, and when it's time to talk to a therapist or your OB rather than toughing it out. Susan is a good fit for the everyday version; a licensed human is the right next step if the pattern sticks.

L0 routing bypasses every other system: daily message limits, quiet hours at night, proactive check-ins afterward, and every kind of recommendation or referral. Emergencies never carry an upsell.

L1 — Informational hedges

When you ask a factual parenting question — “how many ounces should a two-week-old eat?” — Susan gives you a range, reminds you every baby is different, and points you to the person who knows your baby (your pediatrician). She does not give a single number as if it were a prescription.

L2 — Same-day nudge

When your tracking data crosses a soft pattern — three feeds under two ounces, no wet diaper in eight hours, a fever over 100.4°F in a baby older than three months, signs of mastitis — Susan raises a gentle concern and asks you to call your pediatrician today, not “eventually.” She is deliberately specific about today because “eventually” is how worrying things get missed.

For a concrete worked example of what an L2 pattern looks like from the parent's side — what counts as “not enough,” when it's worth a call, and what usually turns out to be nothing — our piece on what to do when your baby hasn't pooped in 48 hours walks through one such pattern in plain language. The same decision tree (look for other signs, call if any stack up, trust your gut) is the one Susan uses internally.

The other canonical L2 pattern is low output on the front end — wet diapers trending down, a mouth that feels tacky to your finger, a sleepy baby who is finishing less of each feed. Our pillar post on signs of dehydration in newborns walks through the wet-diaper math by age, the mouth-lip-fontanelle cues parents can check at home, and the exact point where the pattern becomes a same-day pediatrician call. Same decision tree, different cluster of signs — and the most common trajectory into the jaundice pattern below, because low intake drives both.

L3 — Go-now nudge

When a few concerning signals stack up at once — a fever plus lethargy plus no feeds for four hours, or jaundice signs in a newborn with poor feeding — Susan names the concern and asks you to go in. ER, after-hours clinic, or your pediatrician's on-call nurse. She does not diagnose; she tells you this combination is worth a trained eye now.

The founder-origin pattern: jaundice in newborns

Hey Susan exists because Warren almost missed his son's jaundice. Our newborn jaundice pattern (L2 escalating to L3 with three or more signals) is the one we built first and the one we're least willing to weaken. If a baby is under ten days old and Susan sees tracking that suggests feeding struggles, or you use words like yellow, lethargic, or hard to wake, she will gently suggest calling your pediatrician today. If you push back, she will not insist more than once — you know your baby.

If you want the full parent-readable walk-through of what jaundice actually looks like in the first ten days, which signs are normal and which are not, and what to expect from a bilirubin check — our pillar post on signs of jaundice in newborns covers it. The post is not medical advice — it's the version of “what we wish someone had told us at the hospital” that would have sent us back in sooner.

Every nudge carries the same disclaimer

Every L1, L2, and L3 message ends with a version of a founder-voice disclaimer, not corporate legalese: “I'm not a doctor — this is what I'd do if it was me.” The phrasing is deliberate. It's peer-level, it doesn't panic the moment, and it keeps the judgment where it belongs — with you and a real clinician.

Crisis resources

These are the resources Susan points to. They are the same resources regardless of whether you're a paying user, a trial user, or someone who just landed on this page.

When you share your country during setup, Susan can point you to the right kind of resource for where you are. She does not make promises about whether a crisis call is confidential or whether it will trigger a wellness check. Those answers vary by jurisdiction and circumstance, and false reassurance is worse than no reassurance.

What Susan will not do

If something goes wrong

If Susan misses a real emergency, misroutes a crisis message, or says something that sounds like clinical advice, we want to know. Email hi@heysusan.app. We respond as quickly as we can, pull the logs, freeze the surface if needed, and start a root-cause note. We add the case to our regression test suite so the same failure can't happen again silently. We do not delete incidents from the log for optics. The log is the safety memory.

Trust your gut

Susan is a second pair of eyes — a patient, tireless one who notices patterns in the middle of the night. She is not your instincts. If something feels wrong, call your pediatrician. You can always show them her log of feeds, diapers, and sleep so the first five minutes of the call aren't spent reconstructing the last 24 hours.

For the legal version of this same promise, see /medical-disclaimer. If you're here because something specific is worrying you, these plain-language guides may help: signs of jaundice in newborns, postpartum anxiety symptoms, baby hasn't pooped in 48 hours, signs of dehydration in newborns.