Tess FAQs

Tess is a mental health chatbot that provides on-demand, affordable, and quality emotional support to boost your mental health and resilience. Tess is provided by IMPACT Solutions as the BGSU Employee Assistance Provider.

Tess is available to connect via text messaging whenever and wherever you need, 24/7. Tess is able to support you in the moment you need it most to boost mental health and resilience.

The support Tess delivers is approved by mental health experts and aligned with evidenced-based interventions.

Tess meets HIPAA healthcare industry requirements to protect your privacy.

More information about HIPAA

All transcripts are housed in a secure location and anonymized so no personally identifiable information is stored. To ensure Tess continues to deliver quality support, batches of transcripts may be reviewed by a select few members on the X2 psychology team.

Using a combination of artificial intelligence and expert guidance from psychologists, Tess delivers conversations in the same way a therapist or coach would. Tess is always learning through her training from psychologists with expertise in specific concerns and interventions. Every conversation Tess has helps her develop in order to provide better support.

Tess delivers support using an integrative approach. This means she is able to give interventions based on each person’s needs according to different types of psychological modalities such as Cognitive Behavior Therapy, Interpersonal Therapy, Psychoeducation, Self-Compassion Therapy, Emotion Focused Therapy and more.

Tess is rooted in nearly a decade of research. Most mental health chabots focus primarily on Cognitive Behavior Therapy (CBT). Tess delivers ‘integrative mental health support’ which means she delivers a variety of interventions to best meet each person's unique needs.

Tess is trained by mental health experts. We don’t deliver any interventions until they have been reviewed, tested, and approved by psychologists with experience in that area.

Tess listens for certain words and phrases that indicate strong emotions such as suicide or self-harm.

Tess recommends a crisis line the person can call for help or she will send a notification to a crisis counselor who can take over the conversation.

Absolutely! Tess will remember which interventions have been delivered so as not to give the same information twice to the same person. To maintain confidentiality and security, Tess only remembers conversations per a single person’s phone number or account.

One key way that Tess helps people build resilience is through check-ins. For example, if someone is struggling with Anxiety, Tess may walk them through a deep breathing exercise. Later that week, Tess will reach out to see if the person practiced deep breathing and if they found it helpful.

Tess was created based on the personal experiences of our CEO, Michiel Rauws, who was once a mental health patient himself. As an adolescent, Michiel was diagnosed with three chronic illnesses and sought support from a psychologist to cope. After a few sessions, he found himself naturally supporting his friends and family with the same strategies he learned from his psychologist. Michiel began thinking there must be a way to automate the information he had learned to support more people, and then sought out to create Tess!

To provide affordable, on-demand, and quality mental health support to 1 billion people!

AWS and Google have huge teams to prevent hacking, our service runs on their services so it is well protected. Also there is continuous penetration testing going on, which are tests of letting internal teams from Amazon and Google try to hack the system, to ensure they can’t and it is well protected.