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 behavioral 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

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*.

This app is broken. I sign into it and it sits at a screen that says welcome to the virtual hope box. Then tells what you can use it for and has an ok button at the bottom. Press it and nothing happens, doesn't change, or even allow me to press it....tried uninstalling multiple times.

I used to love this app. it was my safety net and grounding tool for my flashbacks and panic attacks. now that it has been updated it's useless. why did you take away the games?! idc if they are coming soon. you shouldn't have done an update until after you had all the components working. it hurts me to not be able to use this now.

What’s new

- Sudoku game added in distract me game section.