plain-language definitions of the words behind peer support. no jargon, no medical gatekeeping — just what these terms actually mean and why they matter when you’re looking for somewhere to put it.
Peer support is emotional and practical help exchanged between people who share lived experience of a problem, rather than help delivered by a clinician to a patient.
Emotional support is the experience of being heard, validated, and accompanied by another person in a feeling — as distinct from being advised, fixed, or evaluated.
A support group is a set of people who meet regularly to share experience and encouragement around a common struggle, usually without a clinician directing treatment.
Active listening is attending fully to another person to understand their meaning and feeling — reflecting it back — rather than listening only to prepare your reply.
Social isolation is an objective shortage of social contact and relationships — distinct from loneliness, which is the subjective feeling of lacking connection.
Co-regulation is the process of settling your own nervous system through connection with another calm, present person — the interpersonal basis of emotional regulation.
Mutual aid is a form of voluntary, reciprocal exchange of resources and support among people, organized on the principle of solidarity rather than top-down charity.
Anonymous support is emotional or practical help exchanged without participants revealing their real-world identity, lowering the social cost of honesty.
The FDA's strongest label warning — text in a black border at the top of a drug's prescribing information, reserved for risks that are serious or life-threatening.
Prescribing an approved drug for a condition, dose, or age group the FDA never approved it for — legal for doctors, illegal for manufacturers to promote.
The physical and psychological symptoms that can follow stopping or rapidly reducing an antidepressant — real, common with abrupt stops, and not the same thing as relapse or addiction.
The time it takes your body to eliminate half of a drug — the single number that best predicts how hard a drug is to stop abruptly.
The clinical trials a drug approval actually rests on — usually short, placebo-controlled, and much briefer than real-world use.
A follow-on study where trial participants keep taking the drug with everyone knowing it — useful for safety data, weak for proving long-term benefit.
How big a difference a treatment actually makes, on a standard scale — the number that separates statistically significant from worth taking.
How many people must take a treatment for one additional person to benefit versus placebo — the most honest single number in medicine.
The improvement people show on the inert comparator in trials — large in depression studies, and the reason 'I felt better on it' and 'it works better than placebo' are different claims.
The FDA's public database of side-effect reports — invaluable for detecting signals, useless for calculating how often anything happens.
The standard a generic must meet — releasing the same drug into the blood at the same rate and extent as the brand. usually true; famously, once, not.
The FDA's severity scale for drug recalls: class I means reasonable probability of serious harm or death; most recalls are routine class II quality issues.
The federal system that gathers similar lawsuits from around the country before one judge for pretrial work — how most drug injury cases are actually processed.
A test case tried early in mass litigation so both sides can see how juries react — a pricing mechanism, not a final answer.
The distinction this entire library is built on: a settlement resolves claims without deciding them; only adjudication decides anything.
People on medicare before age 65 — there through disability, often also on medicaid, among the sickest populations in american healthcare, and not a stand-in for ordinary adults.
A settlement where a brand manufacturer compensates a generic maker to stay off the market — every refill during the delay is bought at brand prices.
A restriction program the FDA can attach to a drug whose risks need more active management than label warnings — certified prescribers or pharmacies, mandatory monitoring, or restricted settings of use.
Relative risk compares two rates as a ratio ("twice the risk"); absolute risk states the actual difference ("from 1% to 2%"). The same result can sound alarming in one form and modest in the other.
Intention-to-treat analyzes everyone as randomized, whether or not they completed treatment; per-protocol analyzes only those who did. ITT preserves the fairness of randomization; per-protocol answers a different, easier question.
A control condition in which the comparison group receives usual care while waiting to get the intervention after the trial — common where a placebo is impossible, and known to produce larger apparent effects than active controls.
A formal, public FDA notice that the agency believes a company violated the law — a demand to correct, not a court finding, sitting above an untitled letter and below enforcement action.
The FDA's formal notice that it will not approve a drug application in its current form, listing the deficiencies a resubmission must address.
A monitoring design that collects detailed data from a selected network of sites and projects national estimates from them — faster and richer than a census, and only as representative as the network.
The share of people invited to a survey who actually completed it. As it falls, the risk grows that responders differ from non-responders in ways that bend the results — nonresponse bias.
The range published around a study estimate expressing its statistical precision — a 95% CI is the range that would contain the true value in 95% of identical repeated studies.