The Meds Are in the Mail

In two years the telehealth startup Cerebral has built a $4.8 billion mental health business on TikTok ads and readily available medications

- By Polly Mosendz and Caleb Melby

For three days in July, Jeneesa Barnes was haunted by voices. It was as if people were just out of sight discussing her flaws, picking her apart, even when she was home alone. The morning of the third day she retreated to her car, thinking she might feel safer in a small, enclosed space. But the voices remained. Something was going horribly wrong. She turned on some foreign-language pop music, trying to drown out the voices amid lyrics she couldn’t understand. She started driving.

At some point she stopped and texted: “I definitely feel like my mental health is getting worse not better since I’ve started cerebral.”

Barnes, a 30-year-old former rehab manager working as a waitress in California, had been using the telehealth service Cerebral Inc., which she found through an Instagram ad. For $325 a month, she got access to a therapist, a psychiatric nurse practitioner, and what Cerebral calls a care coordinator—a gatekeeper for the other two professionals. That team was tasked with helping Barnes with anxious thoughts, the result of a combination of never-ending pandemic life and the bipolar disorder she’d been living with for years.