Essays, analysis, and field observations from the intersection of product, care, and AI. These pieces explore how mental health technology is being shaped — through workflow decisions, ethical trade-offs, clinical realities, and the systems that sit underneath good care.
Every therapy session produces clinical signals about alliance, symptoms, and progress. The entire industry builds tools that ignore them. Here's what happened when I designed a system to surface what notes were never built to capture.
Seed-stage health tech founders make a rational bet: clinician and engineer first, designer later. But in products where the experience is the clinical outcome, that bet compounds in ways nobody sees coming.
Most product teams think they know what's broken. After mapping 60+ pain points on a global compliance platform, I found that the problems worth solving were the ones the team couldn't see.
Almost everyone building clinical AI is focused on the session. There's a higher-leverage layer nobody is working at.
AI companions felt strange, but the loneliness crisis reveals their profound role. Discover how digital connection reshapes human needs and what founders should build next.
AI is being hailed as the next frontier for early mental health detection, but its inherent 'sycophancy' creates a dangerous blind spot for complex risks like psychosis. We need a system designed to doubt its own intelligence.
Decades of psychotherapy research suggest the strongest predictor of success isn’t technique or technology. It’s the therapeutic alliance.
AI is already outperforming clinicians in trials. But when something goes wrong, who is accountable? From a global regulatory vacuum to the startups quietly building the safety stack, this is what a responsible AI mental health architecture actually looks like.
A purpose-built AI just outperformed licensed therapists in a clinical trial. The future of mental health isn't AI vs. human. It's a layered stack where both find their place.
A YouTuber convinced himself he was the smartest baby ever born. A Belgian man took his own life after weeks of AI conversations. The same reflection dynamics that make chatbots feel therapeutic can also make them dangerous.
AI chatbots feel therapeutic for the same reason therapy works: they create a space for structured self-reflection. The difference is that one understands what it is reflecting. The other does not.
Thirteen percent of American adolescents are already using AI for mental health support. The most important shift in psychological care is happening in the margins of general-purpose chatbots.
Occasional essays on product strategy, mental health tech, and AI — no spam, unsubscribe anytime.