Choosing a mental health app you can trust
What to actually check before you type anything private into an app — and what the answers tell you.
Mental health apps ask for something unusual. Not money — most want that too — but the contents of your worst weeks, typed out, stored somewhere you cannot see, under terms almost nobody reads.
That is a reasonable thing to be careful about, and being careful does not require any technical knowledge. It requires knowing which four or five questions actually matter, and where the answers are.
These guides cover those questions, and are honest about where we sit on them.
The questions worth asking
Does it know who you are? An email address is the join key between an anonymous record and a named person. Required, optional, or never asked — the difference is significant and visible at sign-up.
Where does what you write actually go? Not the reassurance; the list.
Can you delete it, in a way described concretely?
What happens when things are bad? Whether the product recognises a crisis and hands you to a human is a design decision, and a testable one.
What happens if the company disappears? Apps in this space do shut down. It has already happened to a large one.
The guides
Mental health apps that do not need an email
Why nearly every app asks, what it costs you, and the genuine trade-off that anonymity forces on account recovery.
Is it safe to talk to an AI about depression?
Three different questions with three different answers — privacy, crises, and whether it is actually good for you. Including what it is not.
What to do while you are on the waiting list
The least supported stretch of the whole process, and the things that genuinely help while it passes.
From the desk
Four longer pieces cover the same ground from other angles:
Anonymous mental health apps: an honest guide — five questions that tell you which kind of “anonymous” you are holding, and how today's apps answer them.
Why mental health apps ask for your email — the reasons, sorted into the honest ones and the commercial ones.
How Nagi keeps your words unconnected to your name — our own architecture, described plainly enough to check.
Woebot shut down — what now? — what happens when a mental health app closes, and what it means for anyone relying on one.
Our own position, stated plainly
These guides are published by the people who make Nagi, which is obviously not a neutral position. So: Nagi asks for no name and no email, recovery is a word code you keep, and the trade-off that forces — lose the code and the device and nobody can retrieve the account, us included — is real and described in full in the first guide above.
The questions on this page are worth asking of us as readily as of anyone else. They are more useful than any answer we could give you.
Nagi is a mental health companion, not a medical device, and nothing here is medical advice. If you are struggling, please reach out to a professional or someone you trust.