Award-Winning Products!

Brainstorm experts receive 2 Fast Company Awards! Best Designs for Social Good & Most Innovative Wellness Projects

Redesigning the way the world views, diagnoses, and treats mental health.

At Stanford Brainstorm, we are redefining digital well-being by placing mental health at the heart of product design.

We are first and foremost practicing physicians — grounded in the daily care of patients and families. Guided by medicine’s foundational oath to “do no harm,” we partner with leading technology companies to build tools that support human flourishing. Our work has shaped platforms used by millions—helping Pinterest design "compassionate search", guiding TikTok in healthy screen-time management, and partnering with ML Commons to establish the first mental health safety benchmarks for large language models (LLMs).

But we don’t stop at harm reduction. We are equally committed to “do good” — leveraging technology to create a healthier, more humane digital world. We’ve advised global campaigns like Dove’s Self-Esteem Project and Real Beauty Prompt Playbook, which explored AI’s influence on self-image and set new industry standards for digital representation. After sharing the results of research we conducted with the Stanford Center for AI Safety on the ethics and efficacy of LLMs in mental health contexts, we launched the Framework for Healthy AI — a guiding tool for building emotionally intelligent and responsible AI systems.

User Digital Well-being

As these technologies become more intimate — learning with us, talking with us, even comforting us — a new frontier of challenges is emerging. What does it mean to have a healthy digital relationship? How do we build systems that protect psychological safety, while also fostering connection and care?

Our upcoming initiative, the Stanford GenAI Psychological Safety Plan (GPS), aims to answer those questions. Building on the success of the Stanford Social Media Safety Plan — which reduced harmful digital behaviors — the GPS is designed to help individuals, developers, and policymakers navigate this rapidly evolving space with wisdom, ethics, and compassion.

Check out the start of the Stanford GPS in Fortune: This 4-question quiz from Stanford psychiatrists can help protect from the dangers of AI​.

Stanford Brainstorm is the world’s first academic lab dedicated to mental health innovation through active collaboration with tech companies, leaders, and nonprofit organizations. Established in 2016, our lab is female-founded and physician-led. It is built on the premise that to solve the mental health crisis in an ethical and socially responsible manner during our lifetimes, we need solutions based on scientific evidence that are interdisciplinary, integrating multiple sectors, and scalable to millions.

Partnerships are the foundation of our work. We’re thrilled to be members of the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence (HAI), Stanford’s Center for AI Safety, and Society of Digital Psychiatry. Our collaborators include Fortune 100 businesses, tech companies, and mission-driven organizations, including the American Psychiatric Association, Society for Science and the Public, Kevin Love Fund, Tupac Amaru Shakur Foundation, ML Commons, and Common Sense Media.