A Therapy Clinic for Children – and Yes, It Takes Insurance

Mental health-care startup Brightline is treating modern anxieties (hello, climate dread) children and adolescents face while reimagining what mental health support looks like for New York families.

Brightline, a mental health-care startup focused on children, opened its first physical clinic at 32 Court Street in Downtown Brooklyn. Illustration by Tim Le

A new mental health-care practice focused on children and adolescents is making therapy and psychiatry more accessible for Downtown Brooklyn families.

Since its founding in 2019, Brightline has offered virtual mental health care services across the U.S. Last week, it opened its first physical location, located at 32 Court Street. Brightline is based in Palo Alto, Calif., where co-founder and CEO Naomi Allen resides, but chose to put down roots in Brooklyn after establishing relationships with local providers like Northwell Health, which invested in the business last year.

At a dinner held at Popina to celebrate the company’s local launch, Allen told Court Street Journal that physical clinics were always a part of the plan. “The original idea was to have clinics and to have a technology that made the clinics more effective,” said Allen, a mother of three. “I was starting to build our first clinics when COVID hit. It took us six months to open the [Downtown Brooklyn] clinic, but really, it was six years.”