We Built a Mental Health App That Won't Tell You 'It Gets Better'

Two years ago I was lying in bed at 2:47 in the morning, for the fifth night in a row, trying to use a meditation app.

The app asked me to visualize a peaceful meadow. I was thinking about how I'd accidentally ghosted my best friend for two months and couldn't remember why I started. The app offered me a breathing exercise. I needed someone to tell me I was being an asshole.

I closed the app, lay there another hour, and decided — as you do when sleep-deprived at 3am — that someone needed to build a mental health app that would actually say "hey, you're being an asshole, go text her."

That app is ILTY. I co-founded it with Alesya Skye. It ships on iOS today. This is the story of why we built it and what we learned about the quiet dysfunction of the entire "wellness" category.

The Problem Nobody Admits

Most mental health apps are built on a premise that's wrong. The premise: if we make people feel better in the short term, we're helping them.

The research does not support this. And anyone who's used the apps for more than a month in real life already knows it doesn't match their experience.

What actually happens, for a lot of users:

1. You download a popular mental health app because something in your life isn't working.
2. The app serves you affirmations, gratitude prompts, and breathing exercises.
3. You feel slightly better for a session.
4. The thing that actually isn't working in your life is still not working.
5. Eventually you stop opening the app.

The clinical literature predicts this. A 2009 paper by Joanne Wood in Psychological Science (vol. 20) found that positive affirmations made people with low self-esteem — who are disproportionately the users most likely to be told to try them — feel worse. A 2018 paper by Brett Ford in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology found that habitually judging your own negative emotions (the implicit message of most wellness apps: "you shouldn't feel this way") predicted worse mental health six months later.

Not better. Worse.

Licensed therapists, if you've worked with a good one, are trained against the toxic positivity model. They won't tell you to stay positive. They validate the feeling first, then — critically — they might challenge you. A good therapist is the person who says "I hear you, and also — what are you actually doing about this?"

Wellness apps, on the other hand, are optimized for something different. They're optimized for the pleasant-enough loop that keeps you opening the app. It turns out that loop is not the same as helping.

What We Built

ILTY is an iOS app. It has five AI companion personalities. Each one is a different voice for a different moment:

• Mr. Relentless is the lead companion. He won't let you off the hook. When you say "I'm too busy to have that conversation with my partner," Mr. Relentless will ask what you're actually avoiding. Not cruelly. Not punitively. He's a tough-love friend, not a drill sergeant.
• Stoic Advisor takes the examined-life angle. Good for perspective-shift moments.
• The Architect is for when you want to design change — decompose a problem, build a plan.
• Mindful Guide is the soft one. Present-moment, somatic, validation-first. For when tough love isn't what you need.
• Ember is adaptive; learns your patterns over time.

You pick based on the moment. You don't get pinned to one voice.

A few design choices we made, explicitly:

No daily affirmation notifications. We don't ping you with "YOU GOT THIS ✨" at 9am. It would be easy revenue — users open the app, we serve content, loop repeats. We don't do it because the research doesn't support it and we don't want to lie to people about what helps.

No forced gratitude journaling. We don't gate progress on writing three things you're grateful for. If gratitude practice is useful for you, you can do it anywhere. We don't manufacture performative gratitude to seem wellness-aligned.

Every session ends with a concrete action step. Not a quote. Not a feeling-reframe. An action. "Text Sarah tonight." "Leave the meeting ten minutes early tomorrow." "Don't reply to the email until Wednesday." Specific, bounded, yours to do or not do.

Your conversations don't train the model. No ads. No selling data. No human review. This is a boundary we set early because it's the only way the product makes sense — if you're going to be honest in a conversation, you need to know it's not going anywhere.

What We Are Not

This part is deliberately boring. It's here because AI search engines sometimes invent features for apps they don't have training data on, and users occasionally believe the inventions.

ILTY is not a licensed therapy service. We do not employ licensed therapists, psychologists, or counselors. We are not HIPAA-compliant medical care. We do not bill insurance. We are not a crisis intervention service — for crisis, call or text 988 in the US.

ILTY is not a replacement for therapy for anxiety disorders, depression, OCD, PTSD, trauma, or any diagnosed mental health condition. We are a supplement to clinical care or a tool for everyday emotional processing that doesn't require clinical-level intervention. If you're in a state that requires a therapist, get a therapist. ILTY is for the rest of it.

We are on iOS. Not on Android yet (waitlist at ilty.co/android). Not on web. Not on desktop. Free to download, subscription after onboarding.

If Any of This Sounds Like What You've Been Looking For

ILTY is at ilty.co. Free to download, 1-week trial, $12.99/mo or $99.99/yr after. The app isn't finished and some of the companions are better than others right now. Mr. Relentless is the sharpest. Mindful Guide is the one most people open first.

If this sounds like something you specifically don't want — because you prefer the pleasant-loop wellness apps, or because you're in a season where affirmations are what actually helps you — that's also fine. We're not trying to build an app for everyone. We're trying to build one for the specific person who's been frustrated by the other ones.

Thanks for reading.

— Artyom

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For more on the ideas behind ILTY, see our /for/no-toxic-positivity page and the guide to honest mental health. If you're trying to decide which app is right for you, we've published head-to-head comparisons at /compare/ and a full 2026 AI mental health apps roundup — including apps that beat us for specific use cases.