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 Brainstorm: The Stanford Lab for Mental Health Innovation, we lead the way in digital well-being: translating cutting-edge research into practical solutions for healthier tech use.
We are first and foremost practicing physicians; we treat patients and families. Then, grounded by the foundational oath in medicine to “do no harm,” we help companies build products that prioritize user health with responsibility and care. 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).
Brainstorm is further committed to “do good” by leveraging these technologies to build a healthier digital world. We advised Dove’s Self-Esteem Project and Real Beauty Prompt Playbook, which studied AI’s impact on beauty and set new digital standards of representation. Additionally, after sharing the results of research conducted with Dr. Max Lamparth from the Stanford Center for AI Safety on the ethics, efficacy, and safety of LLMs providing mental health support, we developed the “Framework for Healthy AI” to guide industry best practices in AI product innovation.
Mission
Our mission is to tap into the combined potential of academia and industry–bridging medicine, technology, and entrepreneurship to lead the design and use of clinically-informed tools and products (think AI, social media, phones, and devices) to improve people’s mental health and overall well-being.
Seeking help is hard, and doctors and resources are limited. Working together, we can change the rules of the game and think beyond the bounds of the current system. We can create help that meets people where they are. With informed, empathically-designed tech, we finally have the potential to help billions of people around the globe improve their mental health in this distinctive era.
Values
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.