Free through 2026. The first 100 founding members pay from AU$19 a month, held for three years. The details
Peribolos

Welcome to Peribolos: built by a psychotherapist, for honing 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

Also for Windows — Windows will show a security warning you can click past, as the app isn’t registered with Microsoft yet.

περίβολος

In ancient Greece, the peribolos was the physical boundary separating the mundane and the sacred: the temenos.

3 Rooms inside Peribolos

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

Bring your session notes and recordings to the Workshop, alongside 276 clinical references.

Type or dictate session notes, or record a session
Include your felt-sense and counter-transference
Get the session, workshopped — from your notes or recording:
  • What the client brought
  • What happened
  • What the therapist noticed
  • Therapeutic frame
  • Prompts for Reflection
Refine your craft through Deliberate Practice in the Workshop, or 276 Clinical References in the Library
Want some help with how to be-with a client? Work through your concerns by bringing them to the Workshop Chat.
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, pre-session preparation and post-session reflection, the session workshopped. Deliberate Practice is here too: rehearsal, and a growth edge drawn from your own notes. The more of your own material you bring, the sharper the insights and questions that come back.

The formulation desk was developed with Associate Professor Dr Traill Dowie, using his Convergent Hypothesis Model.

The Library

Where the craft is studied.

276 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.

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 harvestYour practice lives on your own computer, not on a Peribolos server. Note content leaves only when you workshop a session or send a Workshop message, with the names on your client list and contact details removed first. It goes to Anthropic, whose commercial terms forbid training on it; with a Peribolos key it passes through the Peribolos relay in Sydney, which keeps no copy. Point Peribolos at a local model and nothing leaves.
  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 workshopped session 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 276 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 session that fails to workshop says so instead of filling the gap.

Free through 2026

Peribolos is free until 1 January 2027. Install it, put your practice in it, and it costs nothing this year.

A few clientsAU$29a monthAU$19a monthFounding rate, held three yearsPart-timeAU$49a monthAU$29a monthFounding rate, held three yearsFull caseloadAU$99a monthAU$59a monthFounding rate, held three yearsClinicAU$199a monthAU$129a monthFounding rate, held three years
Sessions workshopped — the arc, the clinical moments, a check on the frame, prompts for reflection, and the questions to carry into the next one10 a month40 a monthUnlimitedUnlimited
Practitioners1113
Clients, sessions, calendar and invoicing✓✓✓✓
The clinical record, locked and versioned✓✓✓✓
Record the session, consent in the flow✓✓✓✓
A transcript with the speakers labelled, made on your own machine✓✓✓✓
Process notes, reflective notes and formulation✓✓✓✓
The Library — 276 clinical references, cross-linked into your notes✓✓✓✓
Deliberate Practice — rehearsal, and a growth edge drawn from your own notes✓✓✓✓
AI included — nothing separate to set up or pay for✓✓✓✓
Working across more than one location✓✓✓✓
Group sessions✓✓✓✓

A session’s note, recording and clinical note count once. A session already counted this month is free to workshop again.

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. The audio is kept for 90 days so you can listen back — 30 if a client asks — then deleted; the transcript remains.

The only time data is sent to a cloud server is if you use the ‘chat’ interface or workshop a session — your notes or transcript — in the Workshop. Before it leaves, the names on your client list are replaced and emails, phone numbers and similar identifiers are removed. A name that isn’t on your client list — a role-play partner, say — stays as written, so add them as a client first.

Everything that can leave your machine, and when →

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.

Its development is clinically supervised by Associate Professor Dr Traill Dowie.

— Sebastian Kitchen

PACFA-registered integrative psychotherapist · regional Victoria

Have a look inside.

Download for Mac

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.