Founder and owner Emily Kipp-Wright started Beacon Behavioral, a mental health counseling center, as a way for patients to find balance in their lives.

The specifics

Beacon Behavioral’s programs center around a collaborative, empathetic approach that meets patients where they are and assists them in developing habits and outlooks that help them flourish in the long term. Using a mix of traditional methods like talk therapy and medication as well as yoga and equine therapy, patient’s counseling is tailored to their specific needs.

The history

Kipp-Wright discovered the need for a center that provides a holistic approach toward mental health in 2023, when she took a part-time position at a local mental health hospital in an effort to revamp their programs.


Kipp-Wright said patients aren’t given the skills to live a better life at major hospitals where outbursts and breakdowns were almost always treated entirely with medication. She also noticed other modalities, like art therapy, were underutilized.

When she attempted to institute changes to patients' daily rhythms, such as incorporating regular exercise in the sun or equine therapy, she received heavy pushback.

“I saw people coming back like it was this revolving door,” Kipp-Wright said. “Someone would come, especially the teenagers, and need to be hospitalized, but insurance was done paying so they were released. And then two weeks later, they're back in the hospital. I thought we have to do something different. We want to get results and we want people to feel relief and to have the tools necessary to live a better life.”

This experience solidified Kipp-Wright’s belief in a hybrid approach shaped by the individual patient’s needs. Two weeks after she left the hospital, Kipp-Wright secured the location for Beacon Behavioral and hired her staff.


What they offer

Beacon Behavioral has two outpatient programs with a cap of 10 patients per group. The intensive outpatient program runs three days a week for three hours a day, while the partial hospitalization program meets five days a week for four hours a day.

All patients are assigned a personal therapist and have the option for family therapy. A nurse practitioner is currently making medication recommendations until a psychiatrist joins the company in July.

Available treatment options include:
  • Cooking therapy for patients with eating disorders
  • Equine therapy with the Ride on Center for Kids in Round Rock
  • Yoga therapy
  • Red light therapy
  • Dialectical behavioral therapy
  • Cognitive behavioral therapy
  • Family therapy
  • Art therapy
  • Massage therapy
  • Talk therapy
  • A specialized diet designed by a nutritionist
How we got here


As a licensed professional counselor, Kipp-Wright first implemented her approach toward mental health when she opened her wellness center, Anchored, in Georgetown in 2020.

Anchored provides sessions with licensed professional counselors, marriage and family therapists, clinical social workers, massage therapists and a meditation coach. In honor of their work in the community, Anchored received the Small Business Award of the Year in 2023 from the Georgetown Chamber of Commerce.

Notable quote

“I've worked at pretty much every psych hospital you can imagine in the Austin area and in doing that, I saw a lot of things that can be done differently,” Kipp-Wright said. “There has to be another option for people.”