- Fikas - Interviews
- 03 July 2025
- 8 min read
- Words: Northzone
A Fika with Brian Chhor, CEO of Hero Journey Club
Hero Journey Club, the virtual, community-based mental health support platform has been on a mission to address the loneliness and mental health crises of young adults since 2021. By fusing mental health support and gaming, 93% of HJC users have reported feeling better after just one session, while 74% have reported improvement on scientifically validated clinical measures since joining.
In 2019, 970 million people globally were living with a mental disorder, with one in seven 10-19 year-olds experiencing a mental disorder each year according to the World Health Organization. Young adults in particular suffer from stress disorders, life-changing challenges as they enter the workforce and a sense of disconnection in a new digital-native frontier. According to the American Psychological Association, more than 20% of teenagers each year report that they have seriously considered suicide, which is the 2nd leading cause of death for that age group.
Hero Journey Club started with a simple question: what if we could take mental health support out of the clinic and into spaces where young people already spend time and feel comfortable? Could we use the engagement of popular video game platforms to meet them where they already are – creating programs that enable connection, belonging, and positive uplift as the foundation for mental wellbeing.
Our partner Wendy Xiao had a Fika with its founder and CEO Brian Chhor to delve further into the behind the scenes of the private mental health support groups led by child development experts, educators, and therapists. We dive into what it means to lean into the humanity of mental illness, the personal experience that led to the idea in the first place, and what’s to come next.
When you started Hero Journey Club, you already had deep experience in healthcare – you knew the ins and outs of go-to-market strategies, different care delivery models, and the various markets out there. So I’m curious – why Hero Journey Club, and why in this particular form? What were the key things that led you to build it the way you did?
Yes, so I’ve been in digital health for the last 10-15 years, working on everything from electronic medical records to healthcare data exchanges and predictive analytics – all the “cool” tech behind the scenes that makes healthcare work. But a lot of my time has been spent thinking about the deeply personal side of care delivery and how to humanize the patient experience.
I’ve worked across the industry in some of the most heartbreaking diseases – cancer care, Alzheimer’s, dementia, opioid addiction – and saw how people struggled not just with the disease, but with the emotional and psychological toll that came with it. Mental illness is not a separate category of disease, it underlies almost all other illnesses. The turning point for me, though, was when a close family member went through a serious mental health crisis during COVID – suicidal ideation, and there was no accessible care in their rural area, telemedicine hadn’t been widely adopted yet. It really opened my eyes to how broken the system is. And, to be honest, even if we could find him a therapist in his area, I still had to convince him to go seek out the support, look up his insurance coverage, fill out a bunch of forms, make an appointment, pay $250 for the intake visit, drive to the clinic, and then spill all of his feelings and trauma to a stranger for 45 minutes.
I’ve spent almost 5 years working with renowned leaders across behavioral health – including national public health policy experts, top academic clinical psychology researchers, the largest behavioral health insurance company in the US, and incredible clinical teams delivering care on the ground. While I was working in the world of addiction treatment, one doctor shared a quote that stuck with me: “In medicine we talk a lot about the addiction, but never ask why the pain.” It made me question everything at a fundamental level. If 40% of people will struggle with mental health in their lifetime, is it really just a biological issue or could there be something outside of us that is making us sick? What if we live in an etiogenic society – meaning it is actually expected and normal to be depressed and anxious given the craziness of the world we live in?
When it came time to help my family member, we turned to gaming – something we already did as a family since we were kids. We set up a Discord server for us to connect with him, and we realized the issues he was facing were things we all felt but weren’t voicing. There was a quiet desperation that had boiled over and it was something we all recognized in ourselves. That’s when the idea for Hero Journey Club was born.
What if we could bring therapy out of the clinic and into places where people are already hanging out? Not forcing them to jump through hoops – appointments, insurance, driving to an office – but meeting them where they already are. And what if we could start with belonging and connection, not illness, as the starting point for healing. Hero Journey Club started as an idea to use gaming as a space for mental health support, and quickly grew into a community of over 40,000 people and hundreds of therapists who also believed in our mission.
Amazing! Community-based support is central to Hero Journey Club’s approach. How do you foster a strong sense of community and engagement among users, and what measures are in place to ensure that this community remains supportive and inclusive for all members?
We started with small groups in games like Minecraft and Stardew Valley – just hanging out with a therapist guiding conversation. It wasn’t formal therapy, just space to connect and share real experiences with each other and practice mental wellness tools in real time. Sometimes it’s easier to work on your mental health when the focus isn’t all on you, plus you can learn from other people going through similar experiences. Therapists love it too – many say it feels like self-care, offering connection outside the rigid structure of the current system, and providing support that they had hoped for when they were younger.
At Hero Journey Club, one of our core values is creating private, pseudonymous spaces where people can be fully themselves. We match users by shared interests and backgrounds, so connection comes naturally. Gaming becomes a tool for engagement, not escape. We’ve embedded techniques from Cognitive Behavioral Therapy and Dialectical Behavioral Therapy into the experience, built secure platforms for structured sessions, and use smart moderation to keep it safe. It’s a place to build trust, practice social skills, and heal together.
You’ve already had such a big impact in a very new space for behavioral health and collaboration with mental health professionals has been a core part of your offering. Can you tell us a bit more about how HJC integrates professional expertise into its platform? What are the scientifically validated clinical measures you use?
A lot of people told us early on, “Why don’t you just build a real healthcare company?” But we had this hunch: what if connection is care? So we built around that. We brought in experienced clinicians – masters and doctorate-level therapists – not to replicate clinical therapy, but to create a space that’s evidence-informed, community-driven, accessible, and authentic. Sessions are just $40, but our outcomes – measured by clinical tools like PHQ-9 and GAD-7 – are on par with traditional one-on-one therapy. People stick around because it works: traditional therapy sees huge drop-off after two sessions, the average HJC member stays with us for over six months. A large number of our early members have been with us for over 3 years!
We’ve partnered with mental health experts to build a new kind of curriculum that blends mental health skills with gaming environments, and we’re accredited by the American Psychological Association to offer continuing medical education credits to clinicians who want to learn these tools. Our clinical leadership team has built some of the biggest behavioral health companies in the world and started by grounding our programs in real science, and we’ve got our first major peer-reviewed study coming out soon. At the end of the day, we’re not just supporting individuals – we’re reshaping how the system thinks about mental health: not as a medical transaction, but as something social, continuous, and deeply human.
Amazing. I think it’s so important and impressive to see the validation from a clinical standpoint. Another key fact about HJC is that you prioritize early mental health intervention. Can you talk us through that a bit more and how the curation of groups works.
Early mental health intervention has always been central to our mission, especially since so many mental health challenges begin by age 14. We’re reaching a global community of 2.8 billion gamers, 25% of whom live with depression or anxiety. We know how critical it is to catch things early – before they escalate.
So, we’ve designed our programs around age-specific needs. For kids 8-12, it’s social-emotional learning.
Teens 13-18 and Young Adults 18-30 get subclinical group mental health support while gaming.
What really sets us apart is how we build community. Early on, we used to hand-match groups down to the smallest details – like 20-something nonbinary autistic women who love a specific anime and crocheting but have unprocessed trauma with their mothers, or emotionally-stuck Midwest-based IT engineers into German heavymetal and skateboarding. That level of personalization helped strangers connect fast and build trust. Now, we’ve scaled that process beyond hand-matching groups, but we’ve kept the heart of it intact. Human connection remains a cornerstone of our therapeutic model – because real healing starts with being seen and understood by people who accept you. Over time, we developed a unique culture in our program and were called the “kindest place on the internet” by some of our members.
It really is so important to get support with people who understand you. Last question from me: looking ahead, how are you thinking about the future?
We’re really thinking about how to meet the moment – especially with the $11 billion in federal mental health funding cuts. That’s pushed us to double down on scalable, cost-effective solutions that can support the hundreds of millions of people struggling with their mental health. A big part of that is earlier intervention, which is why we’ve expanded programs for younger age groups – like socioemotional learning for kids 8–12 and subclinical group mental health support for teens.
We recently expanded our focus to also support teens and adolescents after many parents were desperate to get their kids into the program. We built our own session platform for the group voice sessions and a library of over 200 therapeutic game missions based on science-backed socioemotional learning curricula. Our sessions are still facilitated by child development experts who are Master’s or Doctorate-level special education teachers, therapists, or counselors.
Our hope is that we can get upstream of the mental health crisis by teaching young people important mental wellness skills for emotional regulation, conflict resolution, social engagement, and stress management before they balloons into serious mental health crises, in a program where they can practice these skills with other people their age in a secured, judgement-free space that they already feel comfortable in.
Tackling the youth mental health crisis in this unique way – and supporting the parents, school counselors, teachers, and therapists who work tirelessly to help their kids – has been an incredibly complex but rewarding process. At the same time, we’re seeing a surge in demand from schools, which is opening up exciting partnerships across gaming, healthcare, and education.
We’re embedding mental health support directly into the spaces where young people already are – like gaming platforms – which allows us to scale in a way that feels natural and impactful. There’s a lot in the pipeline and I’m really excited about what’s ahead. The global mental health crisis has continued to get worse since the pandemic and we see greater need for support than ever before. It’s time for us to lean into more innovative, impactful ways to tackle this problem.
