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Mental health

12 posts on mental health.

Oregon Providers: use the directory with your AI assistant

If you already talk to Claude or ChatGPT, you can point it at Oregon Providers and ask for a therapist the way you would ask a friend who knows Oregon. Free, read-only, no sign-in.

Trained to listen: where my engineering judgment comes from

The nine posts before this one are about code. This one is about where the judgment underneath them came from: a house of two immigrant engineers, junior tennis, recovery in 2014, a decade of intake, assessment and crisis work, and what all of it does to the way I build.

Custom mental health web apps whose answers never leave the device

What a practice gets when it buys one of these is a tool that holds nothing. No row, no account, no export, and therefore no retention schedule to write, no breach plan to rehearse and no deletion request to route through a person three years from now. That is a storage decision, made before any screen is designed, and it decides most of what comes after it. It also has a limit worth being precise about, because the page a tool sits on is a separate question from the tool.

What a therapy practice website should never ask for

The federal definition of individually identifiable health information covers anything a provider receives that relates to a person's mental health or condition and can be tied back to them. Not diagnosis, not treatment: condition. So the website for my own counseling practice never asked for a history, never held a calendar and never took a card. Every other decision on it followed from that one word.

A counselor directory on iOS: what moved to the phone

The boundary between a web directory and its iPhone app is a decision about what deserves to travel. Mine let 589 verified providers cross, in four public JSON files, with the crisis numbers compiled into the binary so they survive with no signal. It left behind the unclaimed license records, the ranking, the accounts, the analytics, and any reason to ask where you are.

One button, no reading, no login: designing panic.btn

There is no account to make, no menu to open and no paragraph to read. Press the one shape on the screen and it becomes a breathing pacer, vibrating on each phase change so the pace can be followed with your eyes shut. This is what that press does, where a counselor's vocabulary shows up in the interface, and where the app stops.

iLovable: a box of therapy tools that stays on the phone

A parts map, a CBT chain, a mood check-in and a day count, in an app that downloads at 13.5 MB and sends nothing to me. The exercises came off paper I handed people in a counseling room for ten years. Most of the design work was deciding what the screen would refuse to do.

What on-device AI costs: a voice journal at 813.4 MB

Mutterly runs on an iPhone XS, a phone from 2018, because its language model rides inside the download. Apple's own on-device model ships almost nothing extra and starts at the iPhone 15 Pro. Five model years of phones sit between those two floors, and that gap is the whole reason for the size.

Finding a counselor in Oregon

A person looking for a therapist has one word for the problem, the name of a town, and about a minute of patience. Here is what ORCounselors.com does with that: one search box, a five-minute wizard, four access filters, and a ranking that sorts by verification first and locality second, until somebody asks to be seen in person.

What $99 a month buys a clinical practice

Two tiers on a page nobody has to call about: Foundation at $99 a month, Foundation plus Local at $199, setup $500 once. What each one includes, why the Stripe hand-off happens after the intake instead of from a buy button, and the three rules that decide how a therapy practice site gets built.

Three small iOS apps, and what each of them taught me

Three small iOS apps, one of them 340 times the size of the smallest, and all three declare the same thing on the store: data not collected. The spread between those numbers is the price of keeping a promise on the device, and it is the most useful thing I took out of building them.

Building trust with thousands of providers in Oregon

A directory is easy. Sixteen thousand indexed providers is a spreadsheet. The hard part, and the real product, is trust, and it gets built one conversation at a time.

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