AirTree Mental Health & Wellbeing Support Panel — Open Source List
For the last 2 years we’ve been trying to experiment with ways to help our founders and their teams deal with the intense stress of building startups. That pressure has clearly intensified these last two weeks, so we have decided to open source some of the mental health resources we’ve developed in the hopes that they might help other founders who are out there struggling.
Even in good times, mental health issues impact founders at 2–3x the rate for the wider population. In uncertain times like this, this number will be much, much higher.
It’s an area that‘s very important to us. A number of the founders have been through some dark days with mental health issues over the years. Some of the AirTree team have been through them too — we’re happy to talk about them and there’s no shame in doing so. In fact we try to bring people together to speak and write about these issues as much as possible. The hope is that we can help normalise them and better support our network when they’re going through tough times.
As part of this, we’ve worked with a lot of professionals and have received a heap of recommendations on mental health experts. Over the years we’ve compiled a list of them so we could recommend them to our founders.
We send this list to all of our new portfolio companies when we invest. We also offer to pick up the bill for any of our founders or their teams who want to access any of the clinical or crisis counselling services on there.
The AirTree Mental Health & Wellbeing Support List
Today we’re open sourcing this list. We’re hoping it might be useful for founders and teams beyond our portfolio too.
This is obviously not an exhaustive list of experts working in this space. Australia and NZ are filled with highly trained, kind and caring professionals who can help. This is only a short list and it’s only ever going to scratch the surface. But hopefully it’s a useful start.
If you have any feedback or other recommendations on mental health or wellbeing professionals, we’d love to add them — so please get in touch (Emails at the bottom of this post)
Lessons along the way
Since we first started pulling this support panel together in 2018, we’ve experimented a lot around the way we support our founders’ mental health. We’ve also made a bunch of mistakes along the way (some of which now seem obvious in retrospect). In the interests of continual improvement, here are some of the things we’ve learned along the way.
Everyone needs different help, and not everyone knows what sort of help they need. Initially, we started with just a list of recommended clinical psychologists and crisis counsellors. A lot of the feedback was that this was helpful, but didn’t cover a lot of the other areas people were looking for support. We gradually expanded the list to include experts on sleep, relationships, diet, mindfulness and other areas. We’d love to add more — so please let us know what would be helpful.
Anonymity is the safest bet. This one is probably the most obvious, but we still messed it up at first. When we started offering to pay for clinical support, we wondered why so few people were taking us up on the offer. The need was there, but it turns out very few people want to admit to anyone (let alone their investors) that they need help. We’d love to be able to have honest conversations with all of our founders on these topics — but we’re also realistic. There’s unfortunately still some stigma attached to these issues. So we started to pay for sessions anonymously (i.e. the experts would meet our founders and send us invoices on a no-names basis). That’s when we saw adoption go from < 1 company per quarter to 3–4 per quarter.
Not just for founders. When we first set the panel up, we did it with founders in mind. The statistics around founder mental health are alarming, and so they tend to grab most of the headlines. But mental health issues are not limited to founders — they often impact the rest of the team just as much. And so we got several early requests to open up the panel to our whole portfolio teams, which we did.
We want to support the community as much as we can through the next few months, we’d love to hear from you if you have ideas for any events or resources we can pull together to help
If you’re reading this and are looking for someone to speak to — about whatever it is you might be going through — please always feel free to shoot us a line.
James & Jax
james [at] airtree [dot] vc & jackie [at] airtree [dot] vc
A full list of AirTree’s Open Source VC resources can be accessed here.
