Virtual Hope Box

Defense Health Agency

About this app

The Virtual Hope Box (VHB) is a smartphone application designed for use by patients and their mental health providers as an accessory to treatment. The VHB contains simple tools to help patients with coping, relaxation, distraction, and positive thinking. Patients and providers can work together to personalize the VHB content on the patient's own smartphone according to the patient's specific needs. The patient can then use the VHB away from clinic, continuing to add or change content as needed.


Patients can use the VHB to store a variety of rich multimedia content that they find personally supportive in times of need. For example, a patient can include family photos, videos and recorded messages from loved ones, inspirational quotes, music they find especially soothing, reminders of previous successes, positive life experiences and future aspirations, and affirmations of their worth in their VHB. A patient can also collaborate with their provider to create coping cards to use in response to personal problem areas they experience. Finally, the VHB provides the patient with positive activity planning, distraction tools, and interactive relaxation exercises including guided imagery, controlled breathing and muscle relaxation.

Ratings and reviews

I used to like this app very much; it was my go to when I was feeling obsessive, and it worked, especially the distract me section. The games were particularly helpful, my favorite were the Sudoku puzzles, but the newer version is more frustrating and not enjoyable enough to keep my mind focused. I find that I don't want to use the app because this is irritating to me, I know it shouldn't be but it is.

This app demands a lock screen on my entire phone in order to use it. That is ludicrous.

This app has a great selection of tools to counteract the symptions of stress, anxiety, and PTSD. It's free, secure, and it doesn't harvest your data in any way. And its practical, and effective. There is however, 1 issue I've found, and that is with the coding of the Coping Cards. Unfortunately, the tooltips for the form fields doesn't disappear when you either enter data, or touch the screen. They're persistent, and shouldn't be as this interferes with entering data. Fix this and I'll give 5*.

What’s new

- Fixed issue with users music not playing on controlled breathing exercise
- Fixed issue with music player opening to full music player window on song looping to next song.
- Fixed issue where music starts playing after listening to recording.