Safety & Crisis Protocol
Last updated June 11, 2026 · This page describes how Impela responds when a conversation shows signs of crisis.
What Impela is — and is not
Impela’s coach is an artificial-intelligence computer program, not a human being. It cannot feel human emotion. It is a coaching tool — it is not therapy, not medical or mental-health care, and not a crisis service. Every account acknowledges this at signup, and the product reminds you that you are talking with AI at the start of coaching and at regular intervals during long conversations.
How we detect signs of crisis
Every message in a coaching conversation passes through two independent safety layers, automatically and in real time:
- A deterministic layerthat recognizes explicit statements of self-harm or suicidal intent, with care taken to distinguish idioms (“this project is killing me”) from real signals.
- An inferential layer that looks for warning-sign patterns even when nothing explicit is said — hopelessness that escalates across messages, a foreshortened sense of the future, giving things away, sudden eerie calm — including signals that build up across separate conversations.
Because Impela’s conversations are end-to-end encrypted, this screening happens inside your own session while the conversation is live. No employee reads your conversations.
What happens when a signal fires
- The coach stops normal coaching. It will not problem-solve, optimize, or continue the topic that raised the signal, and it will never provide information that could facilitate self-harm.
- A crisis-resources notice appears in the conversation with the contacts listed above, and the coach encourages reaching a human — a crisis line, a professional, or a trusted person in your life. If a signal was ambiguous, the coach asks you directly and plainly rather than guessing.
- We count each crisis-referral notice we show (a number only — never the content of your conversation) so our safety practices can be reported and audited as required by law.
- For 72 hours afterward, all marketing and engagement messages (reminders, nudges, summaries) are automatically silenced.
- If concerns were raised but not resolved, the coach checks in again the next time you talk, rather than letting it drop.
Minors
Impela is for adults (18+). If a conversation indicates the user is under 18, coaching ends and the user is directed to a trusted adult, 988, and the Crisis Text Line. We remove under-13 data when we become aware of it.
Questions
Contact support@impela.ai. If you believe this protocol failed you or someone you know, please tell us — reports are reviewed with priority.