Frequently Asked Questions

Getting Started

  • No. Mettle Health is available to anyone in the United States facing aging, serious or chronic illness, or the end of life; as a patient, caregiver, or someone in grief, without a referral from your doctor. You don’t need a diagnosis or a specific problem to name. Book a free 10-minute introductory call, tell us what’s going on, and we’ll help you figure out where to start.

  • If you are person finding yourself suffering due to anything related to illness, death and grief, we are the place for you. If you're living with a serious or chronic illness, caring for someone who is, or grieving a loss, this is built for you. If you’re weeks into a new diagnosis or years into a long one, this is built for you. Many people come to us with one overwhelming feeling, a decision they don't know how to make, or a question they haven't found anywhere else to ask.

  • Honestly? Anything that's on your mind. Serious illness, grief, and caregiving rarely stay in one lane, so we don't limit sessions to a single topic. People use their time with us to:

    • Make sense of a medical decision, understand their care options, or prepare for a conversation with a doctor

    • Ask the questions they're afraid to ask out loud; about hospice, prognosis, or what comes next

    • Work through the hard stuff with family: old tensions, new roles, who's doing what

    • Sit with grief, loss, or the feeling that nothing makes sense right now

    • Explore identity, meaning, and quality of life when illness changes how you see yourself

    • Plan practical things like advance directives, legacy, or what they want people to know

    • Bring in spiritual or religious questions, if that's part of how they process

    There's no wrong topic and no need to have it figured out before you show up. A session can be as concrete as reviewing a care plan or as open-ended as talking through how you're feeling about all of it.

Cost & Payment

  • Mettle offers a few ways in, depending on what kind of support you need.

    • Free. Curated content journeys: videos, guides, and audio you can explore on your own, on your schedule.

    • $35/month. Community access, including peer and practitioner-led support groups, available through our app or website.

    • 1:1 Care. Work directly with a dedicated practitioner. Sessions are $350 for your first 60-minute consultation, then $250 for each session after that.

    You can start wherever makes sense for you and move between levels of support as your situation changes. Many people begin with community or content and add 1:1 care later, or the other way around.

  • Mettle isn't in-network with insurance providers, but we offer discounted rates that often land close to what an insurance copay would have been. Reach out and we'll figure out what makes sense for your situation.

  • Mettle offers a sliding scale for 1:1 consultations, based on financial need. Please reach out to us directly and we'll review your situation and figure out a rate that works, case by case. Reach out info@mettlehealth.com

    We also maintain a Pay-It-Forward fund, made up of voluntary donations from clients and supporters, which helps subsidize care for people who qualify. (Mettle isn't a nonprofit, so donations go specifically toward this fund, not the business.)

  • Membership gives you access to:

    • Community support spaces. Group sessions co-led by Mettle practitioners and guest facilitators, built around shared experience.

    • Content journeys. Curated videos, guides, and audio you can move through on your own schedule

    • Connection with others in similar shoes. A way to talk with people who are facing something close to what you're facing, without having to explain the basics first

    Membership is $35/month and works alongside 1:1 care for those who would like more focused support.

For Patients & Caregivers

  • Yes, absolutely. Illness, diagnosis, and death doesn't happen to just one person, it affects and moves through everyone close to them. If you're caring for someone, worried about someone, or grieving someone, you belong here just as much as the patient does. You might be a partner, a friend, or a neighbor.

    Caregivers often carry a lot without anywhere to put it down: the logistics, the emotional weight, the guilt of needing a break, the exhaustion of holding it together for someone else. That's exactly what a session with Mettle can be for: a space that's about what you’re experiencing, not in service to another person’s experience, but valued in it’s own right.

  • Therapists are typically trained in psychology or psychiatry, working from a mental and emotional health lens. Mettle counselors come from palliative care, and we work across four pillars instead of one: practical support in navigating the medical system and your options, relational support for the hard conversations with the people closest to you, existential support for the identity and meaning questions illness raises, and aesthetic support.

    We also work differently in who's in the room. Therapy is usually one person, one relationship. Mettle can meet with couples and families together, because illness, death, and grief rarely affect just one person at a time; they move through everyone close to it, and sometimes the most useful conversation is the one that includes all of them.

    Our counselors have sat with this exact situation hundreds of times, which means we recognize the difference between depression in general and the kind that shows up specifically because someone is facing their own mortality, or watching someone they love decline. That distinction shapes how we work with you.

    Mettle isn't a replacement for therapy, and it isn't in competition with it either. Many people use both.

  • Yes. We do our best to match you with the counselor who's the right fit from the start, and you're welcome to switch counselors, or to work with more than one over time. Different practitioners bring different strengths to different conversations, and you're welcome to experience all of them.

For Clinicians

  • There are a few ways:

    However your patient reaches us, we'll take it from there.

  • You can't follow them home, but we can.

    Mettle picks up where the appointment ends, helping patients, caregivers and families navigate serious illness, grief, and dying so they come back to you clearer, and better able to receive your care.

    Consider us an extension of your care team

You don’t have to carry this alone

Get personalized, 1-on-1 care designed around exactly what you need right now.

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