Ariel Davis for BuzzFeed News
Feeling stressed and overwhelmed last January, Daniel Rojas decided to take advantage of a benefit Starbucks often touts for its employees around the country: free therapy through Lyra Health, a mental health startup that provides counseling services for some of the biggest companies in the world.
Rojas, a 25-year-old shift supervisor in Buffalo, New York, had been dealing with gender dysphoria and body image problems, two issues he says compound each other “like a snake eating its tail.” So Rojas jumped at the coffee giant’s offer of 20 free counseling sessions from Lyra, a Silicon Valley darling cofounded and led by former Facebook CFO David Ebersman.
But four sessions in, Rojas, who uses he/they pronouns, felt frustrated with the progress of their treatment. He said he had to constantly re-explain things he’d gone over in previous sessions, which made him relive the same traumas every time he had to repeat them. So they decided to end treatment with that counselor and find another one on Lyra’s platform.
When they attempted to find someone else, though, they said a Lyra rep told them in a video call that their issues were too advanced for the company’s care. The rep suggested he seek long-term treatment elsewhere and left him to figure it out on his own.
“I work really hard at Starbucks and I want to get every benefit I possibly can,” Rojas said. “I felt alienated. I felt like I was being cheated.”
Starbucks did not respond to multiple requests for comment on Rojas’s situation, and Lyra declined to address it.
The tech industry’s growth-at-all-costs outlook may not translate well to a field as delicate as mental health.
Starbucks bills its Lyra benefit as “mental healthcare for a wide-range of needs, from mild to complex.” But Rojas’s experience reveals one way patients can feel underserved by a startup aiming to be a model for “modern mental healthcare.” In interviews with BuzzFeed News, 18 users, therapists, and former Lyra employees voiced concerns about some of the company’s business practices, including its productivity-based bonus structure for therapists and its use of patient data. Some of the people who spoke to BuzzFeed News for this story did so under the condition of anonymity because they feared repercussions from their employers or former employers.
Lyra — whose juggernaut slate of corporate clients also includes Google, Facebook parent Meta,