A Therapist and Group Practice Owner’s Deep Dive on Venture Capital, AI, and Mental Health Care
I kept getting emails to sell my practice, so I took a step back to examine what was happening on a larger scale in mental healthcare. What started as irritation turned into a full exploration on venture capital, mental health platforms, AI, and why finding an actual therapist who suits your needs is now uniquely difficult.
Every so often, I receive another one of these emails.
It’s usually polished, friendly, and flattering in a way that is clearly meant to disarm. Someone, or something, has come across the practice, the brand, or the visibility of EBT’s work and wants to talk. They want to discuss growth, support, scale, and what might be possible inside a larger network. Sometimes they say acquisition outright. Other times they soften it with gentler language.
What they want is not really a conversation. They want the thing itself. They want the practice, the infrastructure, the trust, the referrals, the audience, the recognition, and the years of clinical work and human relationship that made any of it valuable in the first place.
This has happened often enough that I stopped experiencing it as random. It began to feel like evidence of something larger, something I needed to understand.
More and more, this field is being viewed through the logic of consolidation, scale, and market capture. Mental health is increasingly subject to the same venture capital mindset that reshapes other industries, including ones far less intimate and far less human. The focus shifts away from care and toward growth, extraction, and enterprise value. Clients and therapists become units in a system designed to expand, monetize, and absorb. That bothered me long before I had precise language for why.
So I started paying closer attention. Then I started reading. Over time, my research led me to a few conclusions:
Mental health care is being reorganized in real time.
Over the last several years, digital mental health companies have attracted billions of dollars in investment. Even in a more restrained funding environment, U.S. digital health startups raised more than $10 billion in 2024 alone. That is an enormous amount of money entering a field that has historically been built much more slowly, much more relationally, and much closer to the work itself.
At the same time, the unmet need for care is real and growing. The workforce shortage is real. Waitlists are real. Access barriers are real. Changes in health and insurance policy are real too, and they are already shaping what care people can find, afford, and stay in.
The pitch is compelling for a reason.
A field full of suffering, scarcity, and inefficiency is naturally vulnerable to solutions that promise scale, speed, and simplification.
That is part of what makes this moment so consequential. Some of these systems do expand access. They also change the shape of care, often by pushing smaller practices aside and pulling more of the field into corporate, platform-based models.
The access problem is real. Many people struggle to find care. Many clinicians are overwhelmed. Many systems are outdated, fragmented, and frustrating to navigate. I am not interested in pretending this field ever worked beautifully for everyone. It did not, and in many ways it still does not. More people should be able to connect with quality therapy, and the process should not be so difficult, opaque, and exhausting.
But once a field like this becomes attractive to investors and tech companies, accessibility often comes at a real cost. The shape of care begins to bend toward capital rather than human need. Therapy starts to be treated less like a relationship-based clinical practice and more like a delivery system. It becomes a platform problem, a matching problem, a market opportunity, something to optimize, standardize, and scale.
That shift shows up immediately in how people now look for care. Search for a therapist online and you quickly find yourself moving through a maze of directories, sponsored results, platform profiles, matching questionnaires, SEO-driven content, and increasingly AI-mediated summaries of who clinicians are and what they do. What should feel like the beginning of a search for human care starts to feel strangely close to shopping for software. Every profile says some version of the same thing. Every platform promises connection, ease, personalization, and support. Everything is searchable. Everything is optimized. Everything is available except the thing people are actually trying to sense:
The person.
To me, that is the heart of this field.
People looking for therapy are not just looking for credentials, availability, and a headshot. They are trying to sense something much subtler. How does this person think? What is their depth? Do they sound alive, or do they sound like everyone else? Is there any sign of an actual mind and presence? An actual human being with empathy, discernment, and independent thought?
Two clinicians can share the same licensure, training, and specialties and still offer profoundly different experiences of treatment. The therapist’s judgment matters. Their timing matters. Their language matters. Their tolerance for complexity matters. Their ability to sit with ambiguity matters. The emotional atmosphere they create matters. The culture of the practice they work within matters.
In therapy, the clinician is not incidental. The work happens in relationship. And without a strong therapeutic relationship, what you have may be support, advice, or symptom management, but not quality therapy in the fullest sense.
Technology can absolutely help with access. Telehealth has had a real and meaningful impact on mental health care for many people. Digital tools can reduce logistical barriers. Online scheduling, broader geographic reach, and remote care have made therapy more possible for people who might otherwise struggle to receive it.
But efficiency and discernment are not the same thing.
An algorithm can sort, rank, summarize, and predict. It cannot tell you what it will feel like to be in the room with someone when you finally say the thing you have never said out loud before. It cannot tell you whether a therapist knows how to stay with grief that does not resolve neatly, trauma that emerges in fragments, shame that makes language collapse, or ambivalence that needs space rather than management. It cannot tell you whether a clinician can actually hold complexity or simply knows how to describe it. That difference matters more than people outside the field often realize.
The more I read, the more I kept returning to a strange paradox. People are being offered more and more ways into care. More directories, more profiles, more matching systems, more platforms, more convenience, more summaries, more pathways. And yet the actual experience of searching often feels more overwhelming, more generic, and less trustworthy.
Most people do not begin looking for a therapist from a place of calm, clarity, and excellent executive functioning. They start looking when something hurts. They search when they are depleted, anxious, grieving, barely sleeping, deeply ashamed, emotionally flooded, or simply tired in a way that has stopped feeling temporary. In that state, they are asked to sort through pages of near-identical language, polished self-descriptions, platform interfaces, and vague promises of fit.
Of course that feels alienating.
They are not just trying to find a provider. They are trying to find a person who might actually be able to meet them.
That is part of why voice matters. Why writing matters. Why tone matters. Why independent providers and smaller practices still matter. Not because larger systems are inherently bad, and not because independent practices are inherently virtuous, but because it still matters whether there is a real person behind the words and a real clinical philosophy behind the practice.
Smaller and independent practices often preserve things that are easier to lose at scale. They are usually built by clinicians, not investors. They tend to grow through trust, referrals, community, and reputation rather than market dominance. Decisions are often made closer to the clinical work itself. Hiring can be more intentional. Supervision can be more thoughtful. Clinical culture can be shaped rather than inherited. There is often more room for nuance, more room for specialization, and more room for actual judgment.
That kind of proximity to the work matters to me deeply.
Every Body Therapy was not built in a boardroom. There was no funding round, no private equity strategy, no growth deck. It was built slowly, through years of clinical work, one relationship at a time, with a great deal of care for how therapy is practiced, how therapists are supported, and what actually makes meaningful treatment possible.
So when I say I am concerned about the corporatization of mental health care, I am speaking from inside a field that I love while watching it become increasingly reorganized by people and systems whose priorities are not always clinical or ethical. I am speaking as someone who keeps receiving reminders that what was built through trust and care is now commoditized to those outside the field primarily as an asset.
And yes, that makes me angry.
Therapy should not be frozen in time. The field should evolve. Access matters. It absolutely does. What angers me is that therapy is one of the few places left in many people’s lives where they are meant to encounter something slower, more thoughtful, less performative, less optimized, and more human. It is one of the few places where complexity does not need to be turned into a product feature, and where depth is not supposed to be treated like an inconvenience.
And yet here too, the language of venture capital keeps creeping in.
So what does that mean?
For people looking for a therapist, I think it means your discernment matters more than ever. Pay attention not only to credentials and specialties, but to whether someone sounds like a real person with a real way of thinking. Notice whether the language on a website feels templated or lived-in. Remember that therapeutic relationships are not interchangeable, even if platforms are built to make them seem that way.
For clinicians and smaller practices, I think it means staying clear on what we are protecting. I do not mean smallness for its own sake. I do not mean nostalgia, or the fantasy that everything about older models of care was better. I mean the conditions that make therapy possible as therapy: depth, trust, ethics, room for uncertainty, clinical judgment, attunement, and an actual relationship between two human beings.
And for all of us, I think it means being more honest about what gets lost when care is reorganized around scale, endless growth, consumption, and profit.
Because something does get lost. That remains true even when innovation is real, convenience is real, and some aspects of these systems genuinely help people. Something can be gained and lost at the same time. That is part of what makes this moment complicated.
But if you have ever read a website closely, trusted your instincts, sought out an independent practice, or tried to find care that felt more personal and less packaged, I do not think that instinct is naive. I think it is wise. You are responding to something real.
In a field built around the complexity of human lives, it still matters whether care feels human on the way in. It still matters whether the words sound like they came from a person rather than a content strategy. It still matters whether what is being offered is treatment or just access to a system.
That difference matters to me, and it matters to this practice. I suspect it matters to far more people than the current mental health economy knows what to do with.
