Two weeks ago we launched a free study app for the California Law & Ethics exam, next to one we'd built for the national MFT exam. Both now live in one place: Flowers Academy, a free study app for therapists with three courses. Two are exam prep. The third, Diagnostic Essentials, is the first course that isn't tied to an exam: a study companion to the DSM-5-TR.
It's the same kind of app as before. It runs in your browser, needs no account, works offline, and keeps your progress on your device. What's new is that one install now holds every course, and new courses will appear in it as we write them.
The three courses
California Law & Ethics, for the California LMFT Law & Ethics Exam.
- 300 practice questions: 180 that teach one rule at a time, and 120 exam-level vignettes
- 192 flashcards in 10 decks, with spaced repetition
- Timed mock exams in the real format: 75 questions in 90 minutes
- Quick reference pages for reporting, minors, privilege, records, telehealth, and the rules for associates
MFT National Exam, for the AMFTRB MFT National Examination that most U.S. state boards use. It doesn't cover the current California clinical exam.
- 372 practice questions, from foundations to exam-level clinical vignettes, including case-based item sets and structural family maps
- 230 flashcards on models, theorists, techniques, assessment, ethics, and law
- Mock exams at full length (180 questions in 4 hours), half length, or a quick 15
Diagnostic Essentials, a study companion to the DSM-5-TR.
- 12 modules, from how the manual is organized and coded, through the chapters clinicians meet most (depressive, bipolar, anxiety, obsessive-compulsive, trauma- and stressor-related, neurodevelopmental, substance-related, psychotic, and personality disorders, and the other conditions and Z codes), to a last module on telling look-alike disorders apart
- 54 reading pages in plain words, written to be read beside the manual
- 216 practice questions: 118 that teach one idea at a time, and 98 exam-level questions built around invented cases
- 332 flashcards in 23 decks, with spaced repetition
The two exam courses also build a study plan that works back from your exam date. Diagnostic Essentials is organized by module instead, with your progress shown on each.
What Diagnostic Essentials is, and what it isn't
It's a course for learning how the manual works and what each chapter turns on: the durations and thresholds, what has to be ruled out first, which disorders get confused with each other and why, and how specifiers and codes are recorded.
It's built around a few rules, and they're the reason it took longer than the exam courses:
- You need your own copy of the manual. The course never reproduces the diagnostic criteria. It explains the facts in its own words and its own order, and every page cites the chapter and disorder it comes from, so you can read the two side by side.
- Codes come from ICD-10-CM, the U.S. government's public-domain code set, from the current release. Where the official code name differs from the manual's, the course says so.
- Every case is invented. There's nowhere in the app to describe a real person, so it can't suggest a diagnosis for anyone you know or treat. It teaches; it doesn't diagnose.
- It isn't affiliated with or endorsed by the American Psychiatric Association, which publishes the DSM-5-TR.
How every course is made
The rules are the same whatever the topic. Every question and card was written for the Academy from primary sources: the California codes and BBS regulations, the professional codes of ethics, the model literature, and the manual. Nothing was copied from paid prep courses, exam vendors' sample questions, or a real exam.
Every explanation says why the right answer is right and why the others are weaker, and cites the source it rests on. Each course shows when its content was last checked against those sources, and when the course and its source disagree, the source wins. If you find a mistake, tell us with the source that shows the correct answer, and we'll fix it.
Private by design
Your progress stays in your browser, on your device. The Academy sends no analytics and loads nothing but its own files. Each course is saved for offline use the first time you open it, so after that it works on the train or in a waiting room with no signal. On a phone, add it to your home screen and it behaves like an installed app.
There's one optional exception. If you turn on a daily study reminder, your device's push address, the time and days you chose, and your time zone are stored on our reminder service so it knows when to send it. Nothing about your progress is sent, and turning reminders off deletes them. On iPhone and iPad, reminders work once the Academy is on your home screen.
Already using the Law & Ethics or MFT app?
Nothing changes unless you want it to. Both apps keep working at their old addresses, with your progress where it is.
To move to the Academy, open the old app's settings and choose Back up progress. Then open the Academy's settings and choose Restore from backup. A backup from either app restores into its own course and leaves the others alone.
What the Academy isn't
It's a study aid. It doesn't grant continuing-education credit, it isn't legal or clinical advice, and it isn't affiliated with the BBS, AMFTRB, Pearson VUE, the American Psychiatric Association, or any professional association.
Why Flowers built it
Flowers makes a Mac app for pre-licensed therapists, starting with tracking supervised hours toward licensure, with everything kept on your own computer. The people studying for these exams are, for the most part, the people Flowers is for, and free, well-sourced study tools seemed like the most useful thing we could add.
You don't need Flowers to use the Academy, and nothing in it is shared with Flowers. If you're logging hours toward licensure, though, here's how Flowers tracks them.