Welcome to Kalda. This is the post that started it all, originally written when Kalda was an idea, a Facebook group, and a browser app we were building in evenings. The story has moved on a lot since then; the reason we started hasn’t.
Why we built Kalda
LGBTQIA+ people are disproportionately affected by mental health challenges. Anxiety, depression, isolation, and identity-related distress are all more common in queer communities than in the general population. The reasons are well-documented: minority stress, family rejection, hostile work environments, the labour of moving between spaces that don’t always feel safe.
And yet getting help that actually fits is hard. Finding a therapist who is queer-affirming, who doesn’t make you explain your relationships before the therapy can start, who doesn’t pathologise your gender or treat your queerness as a clinical concern, is genuinely difficult. Especially outside major cities.
We started Kalda because we knew there had to be a better way. A community where queer mental health was the assumption, not the qualifier. A clinical team where everyone in the room understood queer experience by default. A space where you could do the work in your own time, at your own pace, without first having to translate yourself.
What Kalda is now
What started as a Facebook group and a browser app has grown into:
- A library of self-guided therapy courses, all created by LGBTQIA+ clinicians, all built on evidence-based approaches (CBT, ACT, DBT).
- A community of Kaldans who show up for each other across the app, our online sessions, and the wider community.
- A small clinical team who are queer themselves and who treat that as foundational, not decorative. Meet them on the about page.
- A pricing model designed around access: a £99 lifetime pass for the full course library, with a pay-what-you-can option for anyone for whom that’s still out of reach.
We’re still building. The vision was never “a mental health app for LGBTQIA+ people”. It was a wider one: community, connection, and changing what queer mental health support looks like.
What hasn’t changed
The founding ethos is the same as it was in the Facebook-group days:
- For the community, by the community. Every clinician, every course author, every team member is part of the LGBTQIA+ community.
- A safe space, on purpose. We’ve designed the platform around the assumption that some of our community can’t safely be visible. Anonymity is a default. Privacy is structural. More on this in our privacy policy and safeguarding page.
- Communication is hard, and it’s worth doing well. Our courses on communication, boundaries, and relationships came directly from the conversations we had with that first Facebook community about what they actually needed.
What’s next
A growing course library, a mobile app in beta, and an evolving community. If you want to be part of what’s coming, the easiest first step is to browse the course library or drop us a line about what you’d like Kalda to be.
Thanks for being here. The community is what makes this work.
Daniel and the Kalda team
Originally published 1 May 2023; revised for the new Kalda site, May 2026.