About Choiceful

Built for OCD by people who understand OCD.

Choiceful is building the future of OCD recovery support: accessible, evidence-informed, and grounded in both clinical expertise and firsthand experience.

Why we started

Choiceful began as a personal tool. Brian built it after noticing how easily general AI chat could turn into reassurance seeking: the exact loop that can keep OCD alive. The goal was different from the start: an all-in-one support app that helps people build skills over time, work alongside care when they have it, and get better support when OCD spikes.

Today, Choiceful combines lived experience, clinical guidance, and careful engineering across daily check-ins, a 100% AI-personalized treatment course, exposure tools, and AI chats for acute support, reflection, education, planning, and practice.

How we build

Focused exclusively on OCD, not generic mental health advice.

Grounded in ERP and ACT, the evidence-based approaches used by OCD specialists.

Designed to support recovery with a treatment course, daily check-ins, exposure tools, and AI chats.

Best used alongside an OCD specialist when available, and built to be accessible when specialist care is hard to find.

Improved continuously through weekly conversations with Choiceful users.

Built to avoid reassurance loops and support response prevention during spirals.

Built with privacy and security as core product requirements, not afterthoughts.

Our team

Lived experience, clinical science, and careful engineering.

Founder

Brian Yu

Brian founded Choiceful after more than a decade living with OCD across many themes. He first built it for himself after falling into the classic ChatGPT reassurance-seeking spiral, then realized people needed a fuller recovery app: in-the-moment support, daily check-ins, personalized treatment, exposure tools, and AI chats for more than acute spirals.

Georgetown University
Lived experience with OCD for 10+ years
Leads product, user research, and the recovery experience behind Choiceful

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Clinical Advisor

Clarissa Ong, Ph.D.

Clarissa advises Choiceful across the clinical model, including OCD care, ERP, ACT, curriculum, safety, and research direction. Her work focuses on personalized, process-based interventions for obsessive-compulsive and related concerns.

Assistant Professor, University of Louisville
Director, Process-Oriented Intervention Science Lab
Predoctoral clinical internship at McLean Hospital / Harvard Medical School
Postdoctoral training at Boston University Center for Anxiety & Related Disorders
Research and clinical expertise in OCD, ERP, ACT, anxiety, perfectionism, and process-based therapy

POIS Lab Juniper profile CV

CTO

Clayton Ray

Clayton leads the engineering behind Choiceful with a privacy- and security-first mindset. As someone recently diagnosed with OCD, he cares deeply about building technology that treats sensitive mental health data with the seriousness it deserves.

Full-stack product engineer across TypeScript, React, React Native, Node.js, tRPC, Prisma, Postgres, AWS, and AI systems
Former Head of Engineering at TeachMe.To, where he built the platform from scratch
Led engineering work at Pelicargo and shipped AI-powered products at EasyGen

Our mission is simple: better OCD recovery support that keeps getting better.

Choiceful exists for the full recovery journey: learning skills, practicing exposures, checking in daily, and getting support when OCD shows up. We keep improving it by talking with users every week and building around what actually helps them move forward.