Why I Founded Akesa Health
The Mental Health Crisis
21% of U.S. adults (52.9M people) experienced a mental illness in 2020, one million more than the adult population of France, where I grew up.¹
However, 55% of these people did not receive the mental health care support they needed because of the shortage of therapists and the time, cost, and stigma associated with seeking care. The pandemic has exacerbated mental health issues, especially for young people- last year, the U.S. surgeon general warned that the effect of the pandemic on young people had been “devastating.” ² The pandemic has also increased the need for support, and therapists can’t keep up with the demand.³
Family Connection
My mother died when I was eighteen months and my brother died when I was seven. My father’s coping mechanism was to bury the pain, and I did the same thing. Between the age of seventeen and twenty-one, my grandfather, an uncle, and a cousin committed suicide because of unhealed trauma.
When I left France at twenty-one to study and work in Asia, I met friends who talked about difficult topics. I became interested in holistic and mental health, read about Buddhism, learned to meditate, realized that I could befriend the pain instead of escaping it, and that maybe a path back to wellness existed.
Personal Connection
I started therapy at thirty-five to process the ungrieved deaths of relatives. Therapy surfaced long-forgotten memories of abuse. Two years later, my nephew suffered a severe accident. I relocated to France, therapy was interrupted, and I reverted to childhood coping mechanisms I’d tried to outgrow. This lasted for one year, until the pain came back and derailed my career.
My interest in mental health became personal and a quest to find solutions to help me heal from my traumas. I restarted therapy and experimented with hypnosis, psychedelics, and various forms of energy healing. EMDR, binaural beats, and theta healing were instrumental in my healing.
I realized the stigma associated with dealing with one’s mental health. I had two masters in science, a Ph.D., two MBAs and had climbed the corporate ladder globally but was told I was a “loser” for not toughening it up and moving on.
Connecting the Dots
2021, the pandemic was dragging on. My friend Barbara kept telling me how the pandemic had taken a toll and about her fear of falling into a depression. She complained that her employer addressed her and her colleagues’ concerns with meditation apps when they needed solutions not to relax but to process their mounting distress. I wanted to share the therapies that had helped me, especially EMDR, but I couldn’t find any therapist willing to take on new clients.
I researched therapies that had helped me and REM sleep, which helps process distress, and inferred that the brain, similarly to a bone that can repair itself after a fracture, has innate self-healing potential. To address the issue of access to care, I founded Akesa Health to provide digital interventions to help people tap into their brain’s self-healing potential and transform distress into resilience without the help of a therapist. I don’t think apps can replace therapists, but I believe they can act as a first step or supplement to therapy and help people who do not have access to care.
Trauma
At first, I avoided talking about trauma because of its stigma and because I wasn’t comfortable talking about my traumas. When I dove into the scientific literature, I discovered how trauma is often a cause of other mental and physical ailments.
Depression is three to five times more likely in those with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) than in those without PTSD.⁴ Patients with PTSD are up to fourteen times more likely than patients without PTSD to have a substance use disorder.⁵ People with PTSD have four times the loss of work productivity as people without PTSD.⁶
Solutions to address depression, anxiety, and substance use disorders have been developed, but there are few solutions to address trauma and distress. Trained as a scientist, I search for the root cause of a problem to nip it in the bud and have the biggest impact. By addressing trauma, other physical and mental health issues might be addressed. It became clear that trauma and distress were what I wanted Akesa Health to focus on.
The Real Reason
Three years ago, before I healed from past traumas, intrusive thoughts of past abuse started showing up. I’d learned to use meditation to deal with anxiety, I could run to sweat out anger, and I’d learned to let myself cry. I didn’t know what to do with intrusive thoughts that wiped out my brain. I was working at home in New York City one cold January afternoon when my mind blanked out again. That time though, the thoughts lasted and hijacked my brain. I found myself laying on my bed in a fetal position. I looked at the balcony overlooking the city from the forty-second floor of the midtown high-rise where I lived, and for the first time in my life, and hopefully the last, I considered ending my life. A few hours later, I called a friend who put me in touch with a therapist. Later, when I researched therapies that had helped me and saw that accessible, science-backed solutions could be developed, I could not NOT found Akesa Health.
Digital Deployment
During a year-long stay in Sub-Saharan Africa nine years ago, I wanted to understand the healthcare ecosystem and asked a physician in Conakry, Guinea, to take me along one day to the main hospital. I watched HIV-positive patients dying and patients in the cardiology unit without the care they needed because of the shortage of electricity. I gave money, but I promised myself that I would go back with solutions. The advantage of digital therapies is that they can be broadly deployed. In war-torn countries, it’s often impossible to send therapists to help people suffering from traumas. But, most people now have a cell phone. Alternatively, iPads and cell phones loaded with apps can be shipped and provide access to care to those who need it.
Hope
When I started therapy, I called an aunt who agreed to talk about my mother and my relatives’ deaths. I learned that my father suffered depression when my mother died and that my grandmother took care of me until she died when I was three. My father’s brother, my uncle, and his father, my grandfather, committed suicide. I do not know what went through my father’s head after my mother died, but I’m sure he thought about suicide. However, he decided to stay and shoulder the responsibility of raising a young child while managing a farm.
Had my father committed suicide, I may have ended up in foster care and lived a very different life. I was fortunate to experience therapies that helped me heal and meet friends who have supported me on this journey. I used to blame the past. Now, I consider myself fortunate.
I believe that with proper tools and support, we can transform past experiences, may they be painful or traumatic, into resilience and wisdom. We also grow compassion and use our experience to help others on their journey.
If you would like to help spread the words and help Akesa Health reach the people who need help, please connect via: newsletter, LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, or reach out directly to me at marie@akesahealth.com.
Sources
1.https://www.nami.org/mhstats
2.https://www.nytimes.com/live/2021/12/07/world/covid-omicron-vaccine#teens-mental-health-murthy
3.https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/12/16/well/mental-health-crisis-america-covid.html
4.https://www.ptsd.va.gov/understand/related/depression_trauma.asp
5.https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3811127/pdf/nihms468120.pdf
