I Tried Brave Health’s Online Therapy and Found It Accessible — But It Could Use Some Improvements

Brave Health’s mission to make therapy and medication available to the underserved fills an important need, and I was eager to assess the quality of its care.

The Website

As with most online-therapy websites, sign-up began with clicking on a “New Patients” link featured prominently on the homepage. The click-through forms first ensured I was in one of the 18 states Brave Health serves, then asked me for basic information such as my name, gender (with “other” and “prefer not to say” options available), and contact info. Then, I could choose to sign up for therapy, medication management, or both. Next, I was asked for my insurance information, and that was it.

“Congratulations on taking a brave step forward,” the screen told me. “Your information has been submitted to our team.” There was no indication of what might come next — I didn’t get an email or text confirming my registration, nor was I told how long it might be before someone reached out to me. There was a link to “new patient forms,” which were basic release forms I had to sign, without any intake questions. I signed and submitted the forms, and then sat back and waited for Brave Health to contact me.

The Customer Service Phone Line

I got a phone call from them the next day, which was a recording telling me to call them back. I did and was placed on hold. There is no text correspondence option, nor an online patient portal to use — the company relies on the phone line for pretty much all customer service interactions. The woman I spoke to was cheerful and friendly, and emailed me the “self-pay agreement” form, which I filled out and sent back (it did not ask for payment info but did ask for a billing address). They did not call me after I submitted the self-pay agreement form, so I called them again several days later and was able to schedule my initial assessment for eight days later. The company is only open Monday through Friday, 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. EST (their office is in Florida), and only offers appointments within that window. The latest you can start a session is 5 p.m. EST, and there is no availability on weekends.

While scheduling, I was told by the customer service representative that the billing department would reach out to me the morning of my first appointment to take a payment method, and that my first session “wouldn’t happen” without my card info on file. But the billing department never contacted me, and I was never asked for a credit card number. To my knowledge, I still have not paid for any of the sessions I had with Brave Health. Whether a paper bill ever arrives in the mail or if my bills have simply disappeared into the ether remains to be seen. Despite the utter chaos engulfing Brave Health’s billing department, I found it commendable that the company’s focus was much more on getting me seen than getting me billed.

After scheduling over the phone, I received an email confirmation and several text confirmations for my upcoming appointment.

The No-Show

I logged in for my first session using a link that was emailed and texted to me 15 minutes prior to the session start time. I was feeling a little nervous, as I was not given an opportunity to select any criteria for my therapist, nor were there any bios to browse on the site. I had no idea if they were a man or woman, old or young, or had any sort of specific expertise. I never found out, because they never showed up. After waiting about 10 minutes, I called customer service and told them my therapist was MIA. After waiting on hold for about 15 minutes, they promised to get to the bottom of it, and someone would call me back later when they figured out what was going on.

They did not call me back within a matter of hours, which is what I was told would happen. I called them back the next day and asked if maybe the mix-up was because I still had not given payment information. Perhaps I needed to talk to billing? “No, that’s not it,” said the woman on the phone. “There’s a note here saying that that therapist quit but never got taken out of the computer system.”

How many other patients have been stood up by this computer error? I wondered, with a mix of incredulity and horror. I scheduled a new initial assessment for a week later and hung up.

Intake Session

When I logged in for the second attempt at my first session, my therapist was already waiting for me, and began the session as soon as I appeared in the waiting room, three minutes before it was scheduled to begin. She introduced herself and then immediately started barking out a scripted text about the privacy policy, with the cadence of a TV cop reading a criminal their rights.

Then, she started asking me intake questions, many of which were similar to online intakes I had experienced at other companies, focusing on what symptoms I was experiencing. Others I had never been asked before, like: “Do you have a caseworker?” and “Have you ever been assaulted?” Her tone was brusque and sharp, and I couldn’t see her eyes because her glasses reflected her computer screen, which only added to the robotic vibe. Several times, if I tried to explain an answer I gave, she cut me off to remind me to just answer the question with one of the supplied answers: a scale that went from “not at all” to “all of the days.”

At one point, she asked me how often I injected intravenous drugs, and when I replied "not at all," she then asked me how often I shared needles. I cocked my head and gave her a look, saying nothing, silently begging her to complete the puzzle. “It’s just the next question,” she says when I don’t reply. “I need you to answer it.”

“Why don’t they just have people complete this on their own, online?” I ask her.

“I don’t know,” she replies, steamrolling into the next question. In hindsight, I think it may have something to do with Brave Health’s “most vulnerable” target demographic. I noticed some of the materials available online for referrers to hand out to potential patients are designed for low reading levels, so perhaps the initial assessment tries to make those same accommodations across the board.

About halfway through the session, I mentioned that I found her phone dinging every few seconds distracting. “Oh, that’s the company group chat,” she says, as if that’s a valid reason to have her phone chirping at us. We spend the entire session completing scaled assessments for anxiety, depression, and PTSD. My therapist, who is a licensed clinical social worker (LCSW) with seven years of experience, has read almost every word she has spoken to me off the screen in front of her.

Second Session

The next session is still not a real therapy session: We’re formulating my treatment plan, which involves taking more canned questionnaires to come up with objectives like, “Client will reduce GAD (general anxiety disorder) from moderate to mild regarding anxious symptoms by implementing at least three grounding skills three times per week for three months.”

For a brief moment, when I answered an anxiety-based question with my fears around being a mother, the robot mask came down, and my therapist confided that motherhood was the most underappreciated job on the planet, and that she was sure I was doing a good job. Finally, a shred of human connection. “Are you a mom, too?” I asked her. But the moment was over. “Maybe I am, maybe I’m not,” she snapped. “That’s not an appropriate question to ask me.”

Third Session

There was only one technical issue during our calls, when my therapist’s computer unexpectedly shut down, but she was back a few minutes later, and the interruption didn’t affect the session much. Each of our sessions ended with us scheduling the next session: My therapist would list times she had available, similar to the one we had just scheduled, but each time was different. Her availability was constantly changing, so rather than establishing a fixed time for our weekly appointments, we picked a different time that worked for both of us each week.

Brave Health also offers psychiatric services, including psychiatric assessment and medication management. It can prescribe medication for most mental health issues, including depression, anxiety, bipolar disorder, borderline personality disorder, schizophrenia, OCD, and PTSD. It can prescribe controlled substances, including stimulants, hypnotics, and benzodiazepines, only in Florida.

Brave Health has over 40 different group therapy groups on topics like depression, addiction, and grief, but they are not available to browse or self-join, and must be accessed via your therapist.

Session rescheduling is done over the phone, ideally more than 24 hours in advance of the session. If you need to cancel an upcoming session, you will get several texts allowing you to reply “NO” to cancel the appointment. To reschedule, you will need to speak to someone via the phone line.

Since there is no subscription plan, and sessions are billed individually, canceling service just means not scheduling future appointments. There is no formal process to exit the company.

My impression of Brave Health was that it really does have a different mission and a different target demographic than any other online mental health provider I’ve reviewed. The difficulty I had in trying to force them to take a credit card number from me was somewhat astonishing.

Most companies will extract payment info from a client as quickly as possible, set it up on a subscription autopay, and hold themselves blameless if you forget you’re being charged for a service you’re not using. Brave Health, on the other hand, didn’t seem to notice it wasn’t charging me. It’s also a relatively small operation: Brave Health only has about 200 therapists on staff, compared to over 30,000 at industry giant BetterHelp.

Many popular online-therapy companies, like Talkspace, Brightside Health, and BetterHelp, are designed to appeal to the consumer — they often provide a highly user-friendly interface, let you pick and switch your therapist, communicate via text (even with your therapist in some cases), and provide add-ons in the form of online resources and educational worksheets. Brave Health, comparatively, is incredibly bare-bones. There is no portal, no added features, and no bios or selection process for therapists. Everything is done over the phone. They’ve left off all the bells and whistles and focus instead on making the fundamentals of therapy and medication accessible to everyone.

Overall, I was disappointed. I’ve trialed about a dozen online-therapy platforms, and Brave Health fell short of the industry standard in pretty much every sense, aside from insurance coverage. From the website replete with missing links and conflicting information, and no patient portal to speak of, to the customer service that often left me hanging and took weeks to get me scheduled, to being stood up on my first session because my therapist had quit, to the therapy itself, which felt cold and impersonal, my impression of Brave Health was a disorganized company offering mediocre-quality therapy. However, Brave Health wasn’t designed for me: a self-referred individual paying out of pocket to address a mild case of anxiety. For individuals in serious need of care, any care is better than no care at all.

If you need a mental health care provider who accepts Medicaid, waives the copay, and can issue prescriptions, Brave Health could be your saving grace. While I found my therapist’s attitude toward me gruff and rude, and the bureaucratic confusion and amount of time spent on the phone maddening, I was given a treatment plan with clear-cut objectives, and I did get scheduled for regular therapy. My therapist could have conveyed the material for the skill she introduced more effectively, but I was still getting a framework of CBT- and DBT-based care suitable for the issues I had indicated, with medication management available if I needed it. For anyone with access to another mental health care provider: Do that instead. If Brave Health is your only option, despite the hiccups, it’s going to give you what you need.

At Everyday Health, we’ve evaluated over 65 different online-therapy companies in order to find the best ones. We research all companies to get an idea of their mission and business practices, interview employees, survey real online-therapy users, and test the service ourselves from the perspective of an actual client.

In our assessment of Brave Health, our journalist, who has researched, tested, and reviewed over a dozen online-therapy providers, looked at their website, mission, sign-up process, additional resources, professional qualifications, technical and management issues, as well as the care received during actual therapy sessions.