What is AskFredd?
AskFredd is an independent project providing information on psychiatry and mental health, conceived and maintained by Dr. Federico Baranzini, psychiatrist and psychotherapist.
It uses artificial intelligence to help answer people's questions through scientific evidence, authoritative medical sources and clinical experience, with particular attention to safety and to the limits of online information.
It does not replace the doctor and does not prescribe treatments: it helps you understand better and find your bearings in your own health choices.
Why I created AskFredd
I have been a psychiatrist for more than twenty years.
And for more than twenty years I have noticed that many of the most important questions do not necessarily come up during a visit.
They come afterwards.
When a person goes home and thinks back over what we said to each other. When they read the leaflet of a medication. When they search for something on the Internet. When a side effect appears. When a family member wants to understand better. When one wonders whether that treatment is really the only option.
Then there are the questions I receive through my blog, social media and emails. Some very simple, others surprisingly complex. Many keep coming back.
At a certain point I asked myself: can I build a tool that helps answer precisely these questions?
This is how AskFredd was born.
Not as a large mental health portal, nor as an «artificial psychiatrist».
Rather as a digital extension of the information and psychoeducation work I have been doing for years: a place where the ability of artificial intelligence to search and organize knowledge meets the scientific literature, the experience of clinical practice and people's real questions.
A place where you can ask a question.
And, possibly, come away a little more informed than before.
A space to understand and find your bearings
Every day we are exposed to an enormous amount of information about mental health.
The problem today is often not finding a piece of information. It is understanding whether it is reliable, how solid it is and, above all, what meaning it may have in one's own situation.
Can this drug cause this effect?
How long does it take for a treatment to work?
Are there alternatives?
Could what I am experiencing be linked to anxiety?
Is what I read online trustworthy?
Which questions would it be useful to ask my doctor?
AskFredd aims above all to help with this step: understanding better before deciding.
It is designed first of all for my patients, for those who read my blog or follow me on social media and, more generally, for patients, family members and people interested in mental health. It can of course also be useful to psychologists, doctors and other professionals.
The goal is not to tell people what they must do.
It is to help them find their bearings better, distinguishing what we know from what we still do not know, what is supported by good evidence from what is still hypothetical, and to reach the decisions to be made together with the professionals who care for them more informed.
Evidence-based information
One of the principles on which I built AskFredd is simple: when scientific evidence exists, it must be the starting point.
That is why the answers are built by referring, where relevant, to peer-reviewed scientific literature and authoritative sources such as PubMed, Cochrane reviews, guidelines of scientific societies, WHO, NIMH, DSM and ICD and other recognized medical and institutional sources.
But «evidence-based» does not mean presenting every piece of information as a certainty.
Medicine — and perhaps psychiatry even more so — is also made of different levels of evidence, conflicting results, areas still little studied and questions on which research does not yet allow definitive conclusions.
That is why AskFredd tries, as far as possible, to make this uncertainty visible too.
Saying «we don't know yet» or «the available evidence is weak» can be a far more useful answer than a false certainty.
Science and clinical experience
There is, however, another component I wanted to bring into AskFredd: clinical experience.
Scientific research tells us what has been observed in studies and in groups of patients. Clinical practice reminds us that in front of us there is always a particular person, with their own history, vulnerabilities, expectations, fears and priorities.
After more than twenty years of clinical activity, many of the questions I receive are not new to me. Some concern situations I have encountered many times; others touch on problems in which, over the years, I have developed particular professional interests.
When appropriate, AskFredd can therefore also reflect my way of reading a problem clinically, while distinguishing it from the evidence coming from the scientific literature.
I believe this distinction is important.
A clinical experience does not become scientific proof merely because it comes from an experienced doctor. But it can help to ask the right questions, interpret the evidence better and understand its limits in real life.
It is also the way in which I have always tried to practice psychiatry: integrating biology, psychology, individual experience and life context.
Safety comes first
AskFredd talks about mental health, medications and treatments. That is why I wanted safety not to be a mere disclaimer at the bottom of a page, but one of the principles with which the system was designed.
AskFredd does not make diagnoses, does not prescribe treatments and does not replace the doctor, the psychiatrist, the psychologist or the other professionals who directly know the person.
When a question concerns clinical decisions that require an individual assessment, the goal is to provide information useful for discussing it with one's own care provider, not to make that decision in their place.
Particular caution is applied when medications, possible adverse effects, interactions, therapeutic changes or potentially urgent situations are involved.
And when situations of possible emergency or immediate risk arise, AskFredd must give way to the most important thing: quickly turning to people and services able to intervene in the real world.
Why use artificial intelligence?
Because it makes it possible to do something that until a few years ago would have been very difficult: to quickly query large amounts of knowledge and make it accessible through an ordinary conversation.
But AskFredd does not arise from the idea that an artificial intelligence can replace a psychiatrist.
It arises from the opposite idea.
Technology is useful when it helps us understand better, not when it claims to replace the care relationship.
Artificial intelligence is therefore a tool: it helps to search, relate, organize and explain information.
The philosophy of the project, the choice of sources, the preferred topics, the safety rules and the clinical approach derive instead from my work and from the experience gained in daily contact with patients and readers.
A deliberately personal project
AskFredd is an independent project that I conceived and that I personally maintain.
It does not come from a large organization, an editorial team or a healthcare company.
And this is not meant to be a weakness. It is, in a way, precisely its nature.
AskFredd wants to remain a recognizable, personal and constantly evolving project, built around the questions I actually encounter in my professional and educational work.
Many of the topics present arise precisely from what I am asked in my practice, through my blog, in emails or on social media.
If a question keeps coming back frequently, it probably means it deserves a better answer.
AskFredd is also this: a small permanent laboratory of information, psychoeducation and psychiatric outreach.
Who I am
Federico Baranzini, MD, PhD
I am Federico Baranzini, MD, PhD, a medical specialist in Psychiatry and a psychotherapist, and I carry out my clinical activity in Milan.
I graduated in Medicine and specialized in Psychiatry at the University of Insubria and subsequently obtained a PhD in Clinical Psychopharmacology.
During my training I also had experiences abroad, deepening in particular the psychotherapy of personality disorders at the Cassel Hospital of the NHS in London and psychogeriatrics at the Lundbeck Institute in Copenhagen.
Over the years I have combined clinical practice with research, teaching and outreach activities, publishing scientific articles in Italian and international journals.
My way of working integrates psychopharmacology and psychotherapy within a biopsychosocial conception of mental health, with particular interest in mood and anxiety disorders, obsessive-compulsive disorder, bipolar spectrum disorders, psychogeriatrics and, more generally, in a psychiatry attentive to the individual characteristics of the person.
An important part of my work has always been devoted to psychoeducation and the sharing of therapeutic decisions.
I believe, in fact, that understanding better what is happening to us is already an important part of the care journey.
What AskFredd can — and cannot — do
AskFredd can help you search for information, understand a concept, look more deeply into a treatment, critically interpret what you have read, learn about the available evidence and prepare better for a conversation with your doctor.
It cannot truly know a person through a single question.
It cannot examine them.
It does not necessarily know everything that their doctor knows about their history.
And above all it cannot replace that human and clinical relationship in which information becomes care decisions.
So consider AskFredd for what it wants to be: a tool to inform yourself, understand and find your bearings better.
A kind of bridge between the questions that arise in everyday life and the knowledge of psychiatry and mental health.
And perhaps a way to arrive at your next conversation with your doctor with one more question — but also with a few fewer doubts.
Conceived and created by Federico Baranzini