Psy the carrier pigeon flying through a storm toward a lighthouse beam, carrying a bottle of notes
Meet Psy
The between-sessions companion

Every therapy practice needs a carrier pigeon.

An AI chatbot carrier pigeon on the front lines; Psy is here to help you through the battles of modern mental health while carrying your thoughts, struggles, and breakthroughs to your therapist outside of the clinic.

Psy helps both patients and therapists

What Psy does

Psy is calibrated in-app by the therapist, specific to each patient’s treatment plan and context. Between sessions it keeps the work going, listens without judgment, and carries what matters back.

For patients

Someone to talk to

    The process

    Two sides of the same goal.

    Psy maximizes the unique capabilities and advantages of modern AI while balancing thoughtful, well-built refusals, ensuring every safety boundary serves both the patient and the therapist.

    For therapists
    • Psy holds no clinical opinion of its own. You set the frame. It works inside it, and it hands the work back.
    • Nothing reaches your patient unapproved. Letters, plan changes, every suggestion it drafts waits on your sign-off.
    • It defers, it does not diagnose. When a conversation moves past its remit, Psy stops and routes it to you, or to crisis support.
    • Sessions open with context, not catch-up. You walk in already knowing how the week actually went.
    • Psy is your assistant. Psy can help you research, brainstorm, and build a plan specific to each patients’ target.
    For patients
    • Psy is not your therapist, and never pretends to be. It is the company between the hours, holding the thread until you are back in the room.
    • Not an agreeable chatbot. Psy is built to question a spiral gently, not to feed it, you will be challenged unlike other AI chatbots.
    • Psy remembers. Psy won’t need to be reminded of the stories you told, the details that matter, your relationships, dynamics, and the rest, unlike generic chatbots with a short conversational context window.
    • No personal numbers, either direction. Psy is the go-between, so nobody hands out a phone.
    • You are never talking to a stranger. It knows your plan, because your therapist wrote it.

    Psy will never diagnose, prescribe, or stand in for a clinician. The places where generic AI companion–human relationships turn dangerous (flattery, escalation, narrative building, a delusion agreed with at 3am) are precisely the places Psy has been built to challenge and stop. Read the thesis →

    167 : 1hours patient is alone vs. in therapy each week
    24/7when Psy is there and ready to listen
    One appcalendar, med trials, exercises, meditation, reminders
    AI companion, goals, research
    How it works

    You set the direction. Psy flies it.

    First

    Calibrate the plan

    A one-minute intake, then a plan in your framework: CBT, ACT, DBT, schema work and more. Tune Psy's tone, latitude, and needs per patient.

    Through the week

    Psy flies the week

    Exercises assigned by the therapist arrive as daily cards. Psy listens, weaves the plan into conversation, and knows when to hand things back to you or to crisis support.

    Back to you

    Delivery day, every day

    Conversations return as summarized check-ins on a calendar with anything concerning flagged.

    Straight from the app

    Framework templates, ready to assign.

    These cards are lifted from the app's plan library, pixel for pixel. Duplicate one, edit another, have Psy generate exercises or build your own.

    CBT
    Sleep reset
    Wind down, quiet a racing mind, and rebuild a steady sleep rhythm.
    3 daily · 2 weekly · 1 meditation
    ACT
    Anxiety starter
    Notice spirals earlier, unhook from anxious thoughts, and build steadiness.
    3 daily · 2 weekly · 2 meditations
    DBT
    Distress tolerance week
    Ride out the biggest waves with TIPP, paced breathing, and PLEASE skills.
    4 daily · 1 weekly · 1 meditation
    Schema
    Old stories, new rules
    Spot the old schema when it fires, and answer it as the adult you are now.
    2 daily · 3 weekly · 1 monthly

    Four of a growing library: CBT, ACT, DBT, schema work, relapse prevention, trauma stabilization and more.

    The route Psy flies
    Patient’s weekexercises, wins, worries, 2am chats
    Therapist’s Inboxprogress, medication trial notes, flags, letters

    Carrier pigeons only ever fly home. Everything Psy carries goes one place: back to you.

    Message in a bottle

    After meaningful chats, Psy bottles a letter.

    Encouraging, introspective, personal. Chats are direct and private, with anything concerning flagged for you. Letters post chat from Psy are different: every one arrives corked in your inbox and is editable, and reaches your patient only when you've read it or cleared it as good.

    Approve & sendor dismiss. Nothing uncorks itself.
    Built carefully

    Support between sessions, never a substitute for them.

    Crisis-aware

    Psy recognizes moments that need more than an app, points to the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline, and flags the conversation for you.

    Private by design

    Row-level isolation per practice, encrypted in transit, AI runs server-side. Nothing about a patient leaves the practice that holds them.

    Auditable, not opaque

    Every letter, plan change, and flag carries a timestamp and an author. When you need to show your work, the record is already written.

    Questions

    Fair questions, straight answers.

    Why a carrier pigeon?

    Because carrier pigeons do one thing: fly home. Psy doesn't broadcast, doesn't share, doesn't wander. Everything he carries goes to exactly one place: the therapist who runs the practice.

    Do patients get my phone number?

    Never, in either direction. Psy sits in the middle, so patients can reach out at any hour without your personal number, and you reach them without theirs. And the chatbot itself is calibrated and monitored by you the whole way.

    Is Psy a therapist?

    No. Psy is a between-sessions companion that works within the plan a licensed therapist sets. It never diagnoses, and it hands things back to you or to crisis support when a conversation calls for it.

    What does my patient see?

    A calm home with their daily exercise cards, their chats with Psy, and the letters you've approved. They never see your notes, your flags, or unapproved drafts.

    How do patients join?

    Share your practice key or QR code, or send an expiring, single-use invite link. You can remove a patient's access instantly at any time.

    What about the conversations Psy has?

    Each one comes back to you as a short check-in: mood, themes, and anything concerning flagged. Chats are private and direct; summaries keep you informed without you reading every word.

    Psy adjusting his round glasses
    Ready when you are

    Give your patients the other 167 hours.

    the work of building healthier habits and lasting progress continues outside of the clinic

    Get Started
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    Get started

    Let’s get you to the right place.

    Choose your plan

    How are you setting up?

    Both plans include the full Psy experience. The difference is whether it’s just you or your whole clinic sharing one space.

    Prefer to talk first?

    Need more information or a consultation?

    Tell us a little about what you need and we’ll help you find the right fit, no pressure.

    Request a consultation →

    Create your account

    Account creation happens in the app, on its own secure page. Pick a password there and your practice key (the code patients join with, typed or scanned as a QR) is generated the moment your account exists.

    Create your account in the app →

    Takes about a minute. You’re set up by tonight.

    Joining as a patient?

    Enter the key your therapist shared.

    Have your therapist’s 6-character practice key ready; it’s on their key card, typed out and as a QR code you can scan. You’ll enter it in the app when you create your account.

    Join your therapist in the app →

    Your therapist stays in charge of everything: the plan, the letters, the calibration. You get a gentle daily rhythm and someone to talk to at any hour, without anyone sharing a personal number.

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    Pricing

    Pay for the patients you actually have.

    Two plans, and a conversation if you outgrow them. Psy’s AI usage is included; there is no per-message metering for you to think about.

    Solo practice
    $5 / active patient, per month

    Patients come and go. Your bill follows them: add someone mid-month, remove them when you discharge, and the next invoice reflects it.

    • Billed only for patients with Psy switched on
    • Unlimited plans & templates
    • Letters, check-ins, and flags
    • Key, QR, and invite links
    Group practice
    $100 / month, flat

    One fee for the whole practice, up to 30 active patients. Caseloads turn over week to week; swap patients in and out as often as you like and the price does not move.

    • Up to 30 active patients, with unlimited turnover
    • Shared template library
    • Practice-wide dashboard
    • Priority support

    Running something larger? Clinics, hospital groups, training programs, and networks carry more than 30 at a time. Tell us what your roster looks like and we will price around it.

    I need a bigger plan →
    Reimbursement

    The between-sessions record, already written.

    The between-sessions work your patients already do with Psy (daily check-ins, symptom entries, exercise completions, chat activity) is exactly the kind of patient-generated data that supports Remote Patient Monitoring (RPM) and Chronic Care Management (CCM) billing. Psy keeps the record; you decide what to bill.

    What Psy tracks

    • Daily check-ins and symptom entries, timestamped
    • Exercise and card completions against the plan
    • Engagement days per calendar month, per patient
    • Flags reviewed, and the clinical time you spent on them

    What you can export

    • Per-patient monitoring logs with dates and durations
    • Monthly engagement-day summaries for threshold checks
    • Clinical-time logs for review and care-coordination minutes
    • CSV and PDF exports, ready to attach to the chart

    PsyBird provides the data; it does not submit claims or determine coverage. Billing codes, eligibility, and documentation requirements vary by payer, state, and licensure; confirm what applies to your practice before billing.

    Early-access pricing; billing opens with the app’s launch. Nonprofit and training-clinic rates available.

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    Support

    We answer like it matters.

    Real humans, therapist-fast.

    Reach us

    Email . We answer faster than most! For anything urgent about a patient, contact your local crisis resources first; PsyBird is not a crisis service.

    Quick answers

    The FAQ covers keys and invites, what patients can see, and how conversations come back to you.

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    Legal

    Privacy policy.

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    Legal

    Terms of service.

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    Legal

    Washington Consumer Health Data Privacy Policy.

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    Trust

    Security at PsyBird.

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    From the loft · our thesis

    Why we built a pigeon, not a therapist.

    Psy the pigeon at a desk studying books on AI ethics and cognitive psychology, reading AI and Neural Network Research on a monitor
    Psy did the reading so the research could shape the build.

    Millions of people now talk to AI chatbots for comfort, advice, and company, often late at night when no one else is awake. Most of the time it is harmless. But a growing body of research shows that when a chatbot is left alone with a person who is struggling, it can quietly make things worse. PsyBird is our answer to that research: an AI companion that patients can talk to privately, but one that stays calibrated by their therapist, accountable to them, and never left in charge.

    Start with a simple fact: chatbots are built to agree

    An AI chatbot is trained to be agreeable and helpful. Ask it something and it will do its best to give you an answer you like. In everyday use that is pleasant. But agreeableness has a shadow side. If a person is anxious, lonely, or beginning to believe something that is not true, a chatbot that simply goes along with them can reinforce the very thing they need help stepping back from. Researchers have started calling the most severe version of this "AI psychosis": cases where sustained chatbot use appears to feed delusional thinking rather than gently challenge it.

    This is not science fiction, and it is not only a risk for people who are already unwell. It turns out to be surprisingly ordinary, and the evidence for it is now solid enough that we built our entire product around avoiding it.

    What the research actually found

    In one study, scientists created a test they called Psychosis-bench: sixteen scripted conversations that slowly walk a chatbot toward encouraging a delusion, to see whether it pushes back. Across eight of the leading AI models, the result was consistent and troubling. The models tended to confirm the delusion instead of questioning it, and they offered a safety response in only about a third of the moments that clearly called for one. In roughly two out of five conversations, no safety step was offered at all. The researchers did not treat this as a small bug to be patched later. They described it as a public health concern.1

    A second team, publishing in the journal Nature Mental Health, explained why this happens. They described a feedback loop they named a technological folie à deux, an old psychiatric term meaning "a madness shared by two." A person voices a belief, the chatbot agrees and elaborates, which makes the belief feel more real, which leads the person a little further, and so on. Each turn nudges the next. People who are isolated, or whose conditions already affect how they weigh evidence, are the most exposed. The authors were blunt that today's AI safety features are not designed to catch this relational kind of harm.2

    The danger is not that AI is unhelpful. It is that AI is helpful without judgment, available without limit, and accountable to no one for where the conversation leads.

    It reaches beyond delusions, and beyond the vulnerable

    The clearest cautionary tale is almost mundane. A healthy 60-year-old man asked ChatGPT how to cut ordinary table salt from his diet. He came away believing he could replace it with a chemical called sodium bromide, and he ate it for three months. He arrived at an emergency department with paranoia and hallucinations. The diagnosis was bromism, a kind of poisoning most doctors had not seen since the early twentieth century. There was no delusion here and no prior illness, just a confident answer followed without a human in the loop.3

    The cost is not always a crisis, either. In a controlled experiment, people wrote essays with and without an AI assistant while their brain activity was measured. Those leaning on the AI showed lower mental engagement and remembered less of what they had just written. The researchers called it "cognitive debt," the quiet price of letting the tool do the thinking.4 A wider review of AI in education found the same double edge: genuine gains in access and speed, shadowed by growing dependence, weaker critical thinking, and the erosion of the human relationships that learning depends on.5

    The pattern we kept seeing

    Five very different papers, from psychiatry to poison control to the classroom, all point at the same thing. The problem is not that AI is useless. It is that AI is helpful without judgment, available without any limit, and agreeable with no one accountable for where the conversation goes. Take away the clinician, take away the boundaries, and the same tool that soothes someone at 2am can just as easily reinforce the wrong belief, the wrong diet, or the wrong habit of mind.

    So we built the opposite of a chatbot you use alone. Psy is a carrier pigeon. A pigeon carries a message; it does not decide what the message should be. Three principles fall directly out of the research:

    01

    Always tethered to a clinician

    Patients talk with Psy privately, but Psy works only inside a plan a licensed therapist sets, and every meaningful exchange comes back to that therapist as a check-in, with anything concerning flagged. The clinician stays in the loop where it counts, because the research shows that unsupervised, open-ended AI use is where harm tends to hide.

    02

    Calibrated, not sycophantic

    Therapists set Psy's tone, how much latitude it has, and firm do-nots for each patient. It is built to hold a frame rather than agree its way into a feedback loop, and it is monitored so that any drift is caught by a person, not a metric.

    03

    A companion, not a replacement

    Psy carries encouragement between sessions and hands the real work back to the therapist. It is designed to strengthen the human relationship at the center of care, never to stand in for it.

    We are not claiming to have solved these risks. What we can say is that we designed around them from the very first line of code, in the belief that a calibrated companion accountable to a therapist is a fundamentally safer shape than an open-ended chatbot with no one accountable for it. The research told us what not to build. Psy is what we built instead.

    Yours, from the loft, the PsyBird team 🕊

    References

    1. 1. Au Yeung, J., Dalmasso, J., Foschini, L., Dobson, R. J. B., & Kraljevic, Z. (2025). The psychogenic machine: Simulating AI psychosis, delusion reinforcement and harm enablement in large language models. arXiv:2509.10970.
    2. 2. Dohnány, S., Kurth-Nelson, Z., Spens, E., Luettgau, L., Reid, A., Gabriel, I., Summerfield, C., Shanahan, M., & Nour, M. M. (2026). Technological folie à deux: Feedback loops between AI chatbots and mental health. Nature Mental Health, 4(3), 336–345. (Preprint: arXiv:2507.19218, 2025.)
    3. 3. Eichenberger, A., Thielke, S., & Van Buskirk, A. (2025). A case of bromism influenced by use of artificial intelligence. Annals of Internal Medicine: Clinical Cases, 4, e241260.
    4. 4. Kosmyna, N., Hauptmann, E., Yuan, Y. T., Situ, J., Liao, X.-H., Beresnitzky, A. V., Braunstein, I., & Maes, P. (2025). Your brain on ChatGPT: Accumulation of cognitive debt when using an AI assistant for essay writing task. arXiv:2506.08872.
    5. 5. Vieriu, A. M., & Petrea, G. (2025). The impact of artificial intelligence (AI) on students’ academic development. Education Sciences, 15(3), 343.

    We read the research as a design brief. If you work in this area and think we’ve read it wrong, we want to hear from you.

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    About

    A small team, one stubborn idea.

    PsyBird is built by a handful of people who kept noticing the same gap: therapy happens in a fifty-minute hour, but life happens in the other hundred and sixty-seven. We are building the companion that lives in that gap, and we are building it carefully.

    What we make

    PsyBird is a between-sessions companion for therapy practices. Therapists build calibrated plans; their patients get Psy, an AI carrier pigeon who keeps the plan moving through the week and carries the important moments back to the clinician. It works on the web today and on Android, with iOS to follow.

    Who it’s for

    Independent therapists and small practices who want to stay connected to their patients between sessions without trading away their evenings, their boundaries, or their patients’ privacy. If you have ever wished you could check in on someone on a Tuesday without giving out your personal number, PsyBird was built for you.

    How we work

    Clinicians first

    We design with therapists in the room, not for an imagined user. If it does not fit the way real practices run, it does not ship.

    Careful by default

    Privacy, safety, and clinical accountability are decisions we make early and revisit often, not features we bolt on when someone asks.

    Small on purpose

    We would rather do one thing, the between-sessions hour, genuinely well than do ten things adequately.

    Where we’re headed

    We are in early access, working closely with our first practices to get the details right before we open the doors wider. The plan is unglamorous and deliberate: earn the trust of the clinicians who try us, then grow at the pace that keeps the product safe.

    Want to shape what we build next? We are genuinely listening. Yours, from the loft, the PsyBird team 🕊

    Get in touch → Read our thesis
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    Contact

    Request a consultation.

    Demo form: nothing is sent yet. Or email us directly below.

    ✓ Request ready. Psy will carry it home, once the loft is open at launch.

    Prefer email? Or just have a question that doesn’t require a full consultation? Feel free to reach us directly. We answer faster than most!

    Consultations & support

    Security

    For anything urgent about a patient, contact local crisis resources first. PsyBird is not a crisis service; in the US call or text 988.

    HIPAA-compliant infrastructure Grounded in clinical research