Now Serving Communities in MetroWest Boston, Rhode Island, and Eastern Connecticut
You are brave
We'll help you be braver
Braver is a personalized, flexible outpatient program built around exposure therapy-the treatment that has been proven most helpful for anxiety and obsessive compulsive disorder.
Helping anxious kids is an urgent challenge
1 out of 3
kids has anxiety that disrupts their daily lives.
Before COVID statistics
Exposure therapy works
Pediatric Anxiety
43%
Reduction in symptom severity
59%
Children that are much or very much improved
12 week trial, NEJM, 2008
Pediatric OCD
46%
Reduction in symptom severity
39%
Children that entered remission
12 week trial, JAMA, 2004
However,
Only 1 out of 5
anxious kids receives some kind of treatment.
Before COVID statistics
Less than 1 out of 4
kids treated for anxiety actually receive exposure therapy.
In-Network Insurance
Braver services are in network with most major insurers in the area. Affordable private pay rates are available in instances where particular services are not covered. Our intake team will work with you to verify your benefits and understand your costs.
Please note that, like snowflakes, no two health plans are exactly alike and there may be the occasional plan that does not cover a particular billing code even when most plans under that brand name do. We will work with you to confirm coverage of services to the best of our ability before starting treatment.
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Hannah Goodman, LMHC, MEd
Recently I’ve had the opportunity to work with Dr. Garcia and Coach Josie while coordinating care for a mutual patient and together they make a seamless team! During our meeting they offered invaluable insights and observations about the patient and asked important, pointed questions regarding my work with this person. We were able to easily coordinate how we can best support this patient so that our work wouldn’t be redundant or overlapping. We each identified which aspects of care we would target and then made a plan to connect in the future as needed.
I highly recommend the Braver program and feel it is the piece that has been missing in outpatient care for children and young adults who need exposure therapy in order to get back to their lives!
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An innovative partnership
The BCBSRI team began to look at an organization called Braver. It was launched by child and adolescent psychologist Abbe Garcia, Ph.D. and psychiatrist Brady Case, MD, Ph.D. in 2021 with a mission to help kids get better faster.Specifically, the team used exposure therapy to help kids with obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD) and anxiety, who often repeat behaviors as a way to avoid uncomfortable feelings. This therapy helps patients gradually reduce the behaviors by confronting the discomfort one small step at a time.
Traditionally, a mental health care provider administers the treatment in an office, but the Braver team knew the practice could be more effective if it offered treatment in the community. What’s more, with back-to-back appointments and long patient wait lists, the Braver team knew they could use this method to reach more kids where they were.