Peribolos

Welcome to Peribolos: built by a psychotherapist, for the work of deepening the craft.

The Office, where the practice is run.The Workshop, where the case work happens.The Library, where psychotherapy is studied.

Download for Mac See the demo →
The Workshop in Peribolos — a demo practice with fictional clients: the day's page, a caseload sidebar, and a place to write.

Why most AI is untrustworthy for clinical work, and what Peribolos does instead.

Six things the research is saying

  1. Data harvestingOf 32 mental-health apps reviewed, 28 earned a privacy warning label for how they collect and share personal data — near-universal harvesting of users’ information. Mozilla Foundation, 2022 — *Privacy Not Included
    Nothing to harvestThere is no Peribolos server: all your clients’ data, session recordings, notes and invoicing live on your own machine, and identifiers are stripped from note content before any of it reaches an AI. No AI used trains on any of the data.
  2. Cognitive offloadingHigher confidence in AI tools predicts weaker critical thinking and judgement atrophies from disuse. Lee et al., 2025 — Microsoft Research
    The effort stays yoursThe Workshop will not formulate for you unprompted — it asks what your thinking is first and works from what you have already written, which is a design stance rather than a cure.
  3. Learning loss is measurableChatGPT users had the weakest brain connectivity and the cognitive debt persisted after AI was removed. Kosmyna et al., 2025 — MIT Media Lab
    Built from your own notesNothing here goes from blank page to finished note: every render is built from material you produced, so what comes back is your own thinking organised rather than a substitute for having done it.
  4. SycophancyAI models mirror user beliefs over truth — admitting fake mistakes, reversing correct answers when challenged. Sharma et al., 2023 — arXiv
    Instructed to disagreeThe Workshop is instructed to never be sycophantic, to ask before telling and to treat your disagreement as the work going well, drawing on a defined library of 150+ clinical references rather than improvising — which reduces sycophancy without abolishing it.
  5. Clinical risks aren’t theoreticalTherapy chatbots stigmatise mental-health conditions, miss suicidal ideation, and give responses that could worsen crises. Moore et al., 2025 — Stanford Report
    For clinicians onlyNo client ever meets it: Peribolos is a clinician’s tool, and there is no chatbot for your clients to talk to.
  6. Hallucination1.4% of OpenAI Whisper audio segments contained invented content, and 38% of those hallucinations included violence or false authority. Koenecke et al., 2024 — ACM FAccT
    Checkable by designPeribolos transcribes with Whisper too but with guardrails: the transcript stays beside the summary for checking, repetition loops are scrubbed as it transcribes, a recording that captured silence is marked silent rather than turned into invented content, and a render that fails says so instead of filling the gap.

How It Works: Three Rooms, One Practice

Peribolos holds your entire psychotherapy practice and the deliberate work of honing your craft.

Type or dictate session notes, or record a session
Include your felt-sense and counter-transference
Get Peribolos’ ‘render’ of your reflections
Take your work into the Workshop, or follow a hyperlink to a clinical reference in the Library
The Office

Where the practice is run.

Clients, sessions, the calendar, invoicing, and a clinical record that locks and keeps a full history of every change. The administrative practice.

The Workshop

Where the case work happens.

The room for the work between sessions — formulation, post-session reflection, note rendering. The more of your own material you bring, the sharper the insights and questions that come back.

The Library

Where the craft is studied.

More than 150 clinical references across attachment, trauma, personality, rupture-repair, and more. Cross-linked into your Workshop session notes for when you’re ready to learn more.

The Data Security of Peribolos

Everything lives on your own machine — clients, notes, recordings, the clinical record. Your data is never used to train AI.

Recordings are transcribed on your machine, and the audio is deleted after a 30-day window — only the transcript remains.

The only time data is sent to a cloud server is if you use the ‘chat’ interface or ‘render’ your notes or transcript in the Workshop. Before this happens, the data is automatically anonymised, which means names and identifiers are stripped.

Built by the person who uses it every day.

I’m Sebastian Kitchen, a practising integrative psychotherapist. I built Peribolos because I found there wasn’t any software that was made specifically for clinicians like myself.

There will be bugs still, it is in testing phase.
I run my whole practice on it, every week.
I have to trust it in my own clinical work before I’d ask you to trust it in yours.

— Sebastian Kitchen

PACFA-registered integrative psychotherapist · regional Victoria

Have a look inside.

A live demo with fictional clients and a year of sessions — the three rooms, exactly as they run. No account, nothing to install.

Download for Mac See the demo →

Works on any Mac, recent or older. Windows too — Windows will show a security warning you can click past, as the app isn’t registered with Microsoft yet. Everything runs on your own machine.