With regard to questions of a personal and confidential nature.?

I don't wish to appear hard-hearted or unhelpful, but it is not part of Answers' mission to act as a clearing house or contact point for people who need practical help which goes beyond knowledge search.

If there are are users here who are able, willing and available to do that off their own bat outside of their Answers content and at their own risk, good on them. And maybe in the future there will be professional partnerships and charities who will have the vision to set up a shop front here as knowledge partners with the purple badge, within the existing framework. But there is no way that Yahoo would go down the road of pointing the way to users or acting as a intermediary between users and outside agencies, because that would open the service up to a risk of litigation. The disclaimer on the site's content would not probably not protect the service against claims for negligence in those circumstances.

I don't think anyone has read your question properly. You specifically say '... to send the question to a qualified professional ...' which nobody refers to. This is not only a knowledge-seeking site, it is also a place where you can post a question that someone else has first hand knowledge of. I read so many ignorant and facetious answers on here, I wonder how they get away with it.

Yes, I think you should write to the Yahoo team and see what they suggest.

Best wishes.

You may have a point but everybody has freedom of choice as to who they ask and the man in the street is sometimes right when the professional is not.

We all have the choice of going on Yahoo Answers and trying out a question to see what a cross section of ordinary people think about our problem anonomously and sometimes we can get a lot of answers and some may be rather more hurtful than we may like but which in the end the truth comes out., like one question I got answers back that I was "lazy and disgusting" which I eventually realised was something I needed to be told. But I do not think a professional would have said it so truthfully.

Or we have the alternative of www.justanswer.com where just one individual qualified professional is on line with us and in business to make money with his advice, if that is what we want. That one qualified person's advice may or may not be as helpful as a choice of many anoms?

This apart, I read somewhere that something like 55% of initial diagnosis given in UK by GPs at surgeries has been subsequently found to be wrong. But checking through Yahoo past questions in some cases, one person on yahoo has hit on somebody's problem on a medical issue spot on, because he or she has had that problem themself although often various others can get it wrong. It seems similar on legal matters. Sometimes you may find out more from a yahoo answerer than a professional who may be restricted by consideration professional ethics laid down by such bodioes as the Law Society from saying certain things and anyway consulting professional lawyers is not cheap. Think this can also be true in the field of "mental health". For example somebody with personal experience of such a disorder as "self defeating personality disorder" may be able to advise better on the subject's likely thought process than a professional from within a professional institution that refuses to accept there is such a disorder etc..

Sorry but this is strictly a knowledge seeking site.

The rule is a question must seek knowledge or advice beneficial to all

Those posting personal cries for help truly do not want the truth otherwise they would be seeing a professional They just want someone to tell them it is okay

Yahoo has no responsibility to provide guidance nor should they even attempt that.