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*.

Great way to Relax! No time limits on games. Love the phone feature if I'm feeling like I need to communicate--good and bad feelings. A few little things could be more user-friendly. Like, adding the option to create own Activity Name. And clearing the Mahjongg levels. I've completed them all! Thank You, VA Caregiver Support!

Does nothing. Added the app on the advice of a therapist, but you click on an icon and nothing happens. At all. Inspire, nothing. Distract, nothing. The phone symbol, nada. I don't know what's supposed to happen, but I assume SOMETHING.

What's new

Re-publication of Virtual Hope Box on the official DHA account.