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Mental health screening website implementation checklist

A pre-release checklist for rights, evidence, privacy, crisis safeguards, accessibility, discovery, and fictional testing. It contains no instrument items and does not collect answers or scores.

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1. Define the product boundary

  • Inventory every public route, embedded questionnaire, score guide, result state, comparison page, printable view, and legacy URL.
  • Label each journey as a published instrument, original educational tool, calculator, worksheet, or information-only page.
  • State the intended audience, setting, supported languages, and whether minors may use the product.
  • Separate screening, diagnosis, treatment, emergency care, and general education in both interface copy and internal requirements.

2. Record instrument rights before implementation

  • Save the current owner or authorized publisher source, exact instrument version, access date, and commercial/electronic-use terms.
  • Do not treat a validation paper, public PDF, citation count, or widespread use as permission to reproduce, administer, score, or monetize an instrument.
  • Record whether permission is public, noncommercial only, request-based, paid, prohibited for public administration, or unresolved.
  • Keep rights-limited URLs useful as information pages without reproducing items, response anchors, scoring keys, cutoffs, or automated interpretations.

3. Verify citations and review scope

  • Trace item wording, response options, reverse keys, algorithms, cutoffs, result labels, and limitations to authoritative sources.
  • Identify a named reviewer, public credentials, exact scope, canonical review date, and topics that require additional qualified review.
  • Separate what a source directly supports from site interpretation and unresolved questions.
  • Use one correction path and retain a dated evidence register for future updates or takedown requests.

4. Design the privacy and network boundary

  • Minimize collection. Prefer device-local processing when the product does not need answers or scores on a server.
  • Map page requests, logs, browser storage, exports, sync, backups, support messages, analytics, advertising, error monitoring, and service providers.
  • Never send an answer, score, result label, condition or instrument name, sensitive path, crisis action, or retake behavior to advertising or audience systems.
  • Use privacy-protective defaults, bounded retention, no-referrer behavior on sensitive routes, and accurate public copy that does not promise absolute anonymity.

5. Make crisis and non-diagnostic limits usable

  • Place plain-language non-diagnostic limits before entry and with every result or interpretation.
  • Provide visible, descriptive crisis actions that work on mobile; keep contact details visible when links fail.
  • Do not track crisis-link clicks, append campaign parameters, place ads or upsells nearby, or make a questionnaire the gate to urgent help.
  • Test country and audience assumptions. A U.S. number alone is not sufficient for an international product.

6. Test accessibility across the whole journey

  • Use one clear H1, labelled native controls or complete ARIA patterns, visible focus, logical headings, and keyboard-operable entry and reset flows.
  • Associate every answer group with its question and expose selection state to assistive technology.
  • Announce validation errors, progress, and results without unexpectedly moving or trapping focus.
  • Test narrow screens, zoom, contrast, reduced motion, print states, and adequately sized or spaced targets.

7. Keep discovery accurate

  • Use one self-canonical URL for each maintained journey and preserve useful rights-boundary pages as HTTP 200 when the URL remains relevant.
  • Align titles, descriptions, visible answers, internal links, structured data, sitemap entries, and AI-discovery files with the actual on-page experience.
  • Do not publish mass condition or demographic variants, doorway pages, or score claims merely to capture search demand.
  • Keep sensitive query and page telemetry in access-controlled records rather than public repositories or marketing material.

8. Release with fictional, non-sensitive evidence

  • Run source, type, content, dependency, security-header, canonical, sitemap, and structured-data checks before release.
  • Exercise desktop, mobile, keyboard, consent, error, reset, print, and representative result branches using fictional inputs only.
  • Capture network evidence that sensitive routes do not contact unapproved analytics, advertising, affiliate, session-replay, or audience domains.
  • Stop the release for missing rights evidence, unsupported result language, broken crisis actions, privacy contradictions, or unresolved qualified-review needs.

Primary sources and standards

These sources support the general privacy, security, accessibility, advertising, crisis, and implementation principles above. They do not grant rights to any screening instrument or determine which laws apply to a particular product.

Need a prioritized evidence register?

MindCheck Tools is preparing a bounded implementation-readiness review for digital-health and behavioral-health software teams using public or fictional staging evidence only.

Review the proposed scope