Frequently Asked Questions

Soveria is a clinical tracking tool for mental health professionals who want measurement rather than guesswork. Psychologists, psychotherapists, psychiatrists, counsellors — anyone working with clients where progress should be tracked, not assumed. You assign validated assessments. Clients complete them through a secure link or in their own client portal. You see the scores, the trend between sessions, and the size of the change — and you adjust the work accordingly. Subjective impression and measured change do not always agree. Soveria is for clinicians who want to see both.

Open the Clients section and create a new client — name, email, and whatever clinical context you want on file. The client profile is where every assessment result, score history and note is stored. From the client’s page you can invite them to their client portal, where they can see their assessments and their own progress. To send an assessment: open the client, choose the instrument, and send. They receive a secure link by email — you can also copy the link and pass it on however you normally communicate with them.

44 validated instruments, covering depression, anxiety, trauma and PTSD, sleep, substance use, obsessive-compulsive symptoms, emotion regulation, wellbeing and general outcome monitoring. They include the instruments most practices rely on daily — among them PHQ-9, GAD-7, PCL-5, CORE-OM, DASS-21, BDI-II, HADS, ISI, AUDIT, C-SSRS and WHODAS 2.0. Every instrument is scored to its published algorithm with the standard severity bands, and every instrument is available in both English and Russian. The full catalogue — item counts, completion times, severity thresholds — is in the Assessments section.

It depends on the phase of treatment and how volatile the symptoms are. A common pattern: weekly during active intervention, fortnightly during stabilisation, monthly during maintenance. Higher-risk presentations warrant more frequent measurement. Where risk is present or symptoms are shifting rapidly, twice weekly may be appropriate. Stable, low-intensity work may need no more than monthly. The aim is enough data to detect real change, without creating assessment fatigue for the client.

PHQ-9 measures depressive symptom severity over the past two weeks across nine items mapped to the DSM criteria: anhedonia, low mood, sleep disturbance, fatigue, appetite change, guilt or worthlessness, concentration difficulty, psychomotor change, and thoughts of self-harm or of being better off dead. Total 0–27: 0–4 minimal, 5–9 mild, 10–14 moderate, 15–19 moderately severe, 20–27 severe. GAD-7 measures anxiety severity over the past two weeks across seven items: feeling nervous or on edge, being unable to stop or control worrying, worrying too much about different things, trouble relaxing, restlessness, becoming easily annoyed or irritable, and feeling afraid that something awful might happen. Total 0–21: 0–4 minimal, 5–9 mild, 10–14 moderate, 15–21 severe. Both are screening and severity-tracking instruments, not diagnostic tests. They quantify symptom burden and its change over time; the diagnosis remains a clinical judgement. The same holds for every other instrument in the catalogue.

On PHQ-9, a change of roughly 5 points is generally treated as clinically meaningful; on GAD-7, roughly 4. Smaller movements usually sit within measurement noise. A sustained decrease across several administrations suggests the current work is having an effect. Scores that flatten while remaining elevated are a signal to revisit the formulation or the intervention. A sustained increase warrants clinical review — and where item 9 of the PHQ-9 or any other risk indicator is involved, a direct conversation about risk and safety planning. Read the trajectory, not the isolated point. One difficult week is not treatment failure. Three consecutive increases is information to act on.

You can choose freely from the 44 instruments in the catalogue and combine them per client. What you cannot do is alter the wording, the item set or the response options of a standardised instrument — changing an item invalidates the scoring algorithm and its published norms, and makes longitudinal comparison unreliable. If no instrument captures a client’s presentation, record that in your clinical notes. Soveria is a measurement layer, not a substitute for comprehensive clinical assessment. The catalogue grows. The instruments in it stay intact.

Because memory is reconstructive. How you remember last week depends heavily on how you feel today: when the present is heavy, the past darkens with it; when things ease, the past softens. That is ordinary human memory, and it is what makes recall alone an unreliable measure. Depression and anxiety fluctuate. A score of 18 last month, 14 this week, 16 the next tells your specialist something a single conversation cannot — whether the overall direction is stabilising. The questionnaires are not a test you can pass or fail. They make your experience visible over time, so the work you and your specialist do together can be adjusted to what is actually happening.

Your specialist notices a great deal — tone, posture, the things you move past quickly. But observation on its own is a narrow instrument for something that lives largely on the inside. You can describe a week coherently and sound entirely fine while your PHQ-9 sits at 22. You can feel that nothing is shifting while your GAD-7 has been dropping steadily. Self-report, clinical impression and measured severity often disagree — and the disagreement is itself useful information. The forms do not replace the conversation. They give it something to be checked against.

Then they do not fit, and that is worth saying out loud to your specialist. These instruments measure specific symptom clusters, not the whole of your experience. If your depression shows up as irritability rather than sadness, or your anxiety lives in your body rather than your thoughts, a short screener will not capture all of it. That is a limitation of the instrument, not a failing of yours. The catalogue is broad, and your specialist can choose an instrument that fits the picture better. What the numbers cannot show, the conversation can. The work needs both.

Clinical data is stored on Timeweb Cloud servers in Moscow, Russia, in line with Russian data-localisation law (152-FZ), and is not transferred outside the Russian Federation without an explicit request from you. In practice: TLS 1.3 on every connection, role-based access control, short-lived authentication tokens, password hashing (bcrypt), rate limiting on sensitive endpoints, encrypted backups, and AES-256-GCM encryption where data is most sensitive — data exports and connected-calendar tokens among them. We do not sell your data, we do not use it for advertising, and we do not train models on your responses. The sub-processors we rely on, and what each one does, are listed in the Privacy Policy.

Your specialist — the one who sent you the assessment. They see your scores, your response history, the trend over time, and any notes they have written themselves. Other clients cannot see your data. Other specialists cannot see your data. Access is enforced by role and by ownership of the record, not by convention. Soveria staff do not read individual client records as a matter of routine. The exceptions are narrow — a technical fault that cannot be diagnosed any other way, or a legally binding demand — and they are set out in the Privacy Policy. Technical sub-processors (hosting, email delivery, payments) process only what their function requires.

Soveria is built for Russian data-localisation law (152-FZ) and follows GDPR principles for health data, which is special-category personal data. Clinical data lives on servers in Moscow, and the platform operates under the law of the Russian Federation. In GDPR terms your specialist is the data controller and Soveria is the processor: it is your specialist who decides what is collected about you and why. Your rights of access, correction, export and erasure are exercised through them, and the platform provides an encrypted export of your data to support that. When a specialist deletes a client record, the record and its associated data are removed from the platform; encrypted backups roll over on their normal cycle. Soveria is not HIPAA-certified and does not sign Business Associate Agreements. If you practise in the United States and carry covered-entity obligations, Soveria is not the right tool for you today — we would rather say so plainly than let you assume otherwise.

There are many reasons a course of therapy does not bring the change someone hoped for, and most of them have nothing to do with that person’s worth or effort. Fit with the specialist, timing, the formulation of the case, life circumstances — and whether progress was ever actually tracked. It would be dishonest of us to tell you which of those applied to you. What measurement changes is visibility. When symptom severity is recorded regularly, a plateau shows up as a plateau — in weeks rather than months — and becomes something you and your specialist can name and act on, instead of a vague sense that nothing is moving. Soveria does not make therapy work. It makes what is happening in therapy harder to miss.

A friend listens, and that matters more than any questionnaire. But friendship is not treatment, and it was never meant to be. What a friend cannot do is tell you whether your anxiety is genuinely easing or you have simply become better at hiding it. They cannot see the 4-point drop on GAD-7 that says the change is real rather than a good week. They cannot hold a formulation, plan an intervention, and check whether it worked. That is not a criticism of friends. It is a description of what a specialist adds — and measurement is part of what makes it a method rather than a well-meant conversation.