Shining a Light on Mental Health: Innovation in Addiction Recovery
This blog post is about my experience at HackMentalHealth’s hackathon at UCSF over the weekend of March 23rd-24th, 2019.
I’m still savoring the satisfaction of last weekend following a whirlwind of vigor, bite-size intense connections, and absolutely brilliant minds.
While most people were enjoying the caress of an increasingly rare warm San Francisco sun, a couple hundred people, both local and international, came together from 8:30am Saturday morning until Sunday evening in a closed auditorium to hack innovative products, and help solve for the modern affliction of our time: mental illness. Adrenaline and passion carried me through the duration of the hackathon, and it flew by from the moment I attended the pre-hackathon mixer on Friday night, until the announcement of the winners on Sunday evening.
It was my second hackathon, and I wanted to push myself. I knew most of all that I wanted to learn and lead a team that weekend. Given my background in clinical psychology and my recent certification in UX Design, I saw this as a golden opportunity. On Friday, the day before the big event, I quickly brainstormed ideas that felt relevant as well as important and could inform a product.
From my experience as a Mental Health Consultant for the Center for Independence a few years prior, I felt inspired by the Executive Director, who kept driving the point of peer-to-peer services. That idea combined with my appreciation of evidence based therapies meant that I could see a product idea forming with the help of a team. Of course, I also had to come up with the innovation part, and hoped several viewpoints with a diversity of expertise could help me narrow down the technology piece.
I knew I wanted the technology to stay focused on “human centered” delivery of services. I saw an opportunity to better train “peer coaches” who desired efficient quality training in evidence based methods to structure their coaching in order to more effectively share their lived experience and help peers.
On Saturday morning, Adam Gazzaley MD, PhD stated in his keynote address that we as human beings are living longer and that we are less violent than ever before. And yet, we are “still suffering.” With those powerful words, teams formed, and the hacking commenced.
I posted my intro and my ideas on the hackathon’s Slack channel the day before and received interest. My first confirmed teammate was Greg Roufa, a seasoned Product Executive and Entrepreneur who sent me a message and said he wanted to help me realize my vision. Greg both challenged and compelled me with his passion, leadership, and constant focus on scalability and thinking deeply about the business aspects. Greg recruited Dakotah Ducharme, our developer wizard who encouraged us to think about the feasibility of designing a chatbot. Finally, I was also thrilled when Stephanie Greer: Scientist, Designer, and Product Leader at HopeLab, magically appeared and completed our team.
Our final team was four of us on this weekend long journey together. Saturday morning meant deliberations as we debated the form, purpose, and feasibility of our product. We realized we were all fired up about addiction recovery and finally agreed on the potential of a chatbot feature. What resulted was Ripple: “Ensuring long-term addiction recovery success” through a platform for connecting peer coaches to client peers, built around a private chat app, featuring interactive chatbot training for the coach to facilitate supportive communication.
We met with our advisers for the weekend: Asha Bauer, Psychologist at the National Center for PTSD, and Fred Dillon, Senior Director, Strategy & Design at HopeLab who were both very supportive of our product idea. Once set, we weaved through cycles of working apart as epiphanies came to us, and coming together to share and keep iterating on our product.
The next day, when we were ready to send our official submission for the competition, my teammates coached me on pitching to the judges. It was my first time officially pitching and it turns out it was done Science Fair style, as only a handful of judges rotated around the auditorium filled with busy tables of entrepreneurs ready to win their support — wow! The process took over 2 hours, and I had several opportunities to pitch our product to mentors and finally to the judges.
When judgement hour arrived and they read through the first round of winners, Ripple wasn’t on the list of finalists and that was totally fine — 61 teams competed for only a handful of prizes. We were assessed on the following criteria: Clinical Impact, Viability, Technological Quality, and Product Excellence. It was my second hackathon, my first time organizing and leading a team in this capacity. I’m incredibly proud of the work we did to raise awareness into this issue, think outside the box, and develop our final product. As I later told my team, I came in with a spark of an idea, and they really helped me light the fire.
It was very inspiring to see the final contestants present their ideas onstage. Although hacked onsite, several winners had spearheaded their ideas well in advance as well as done research before the event, some for years as a result of direct experiences. The resulting products felt deeply personal to them and addressed real issues. Their passion was palpable — in one instance, it was impressive to see one particular team’s concise and well informed answers as the members quickly passed the mic amongst themselves in a lightning sprint that effectively conveyed their team’s singular purpose and solid structure where they had clearly defined roles.
In the end, my experience at HackMentalHealth’s hackathon was extremely valuable as I realized my vision with the help of my dream team and met wonderful people. I wanted to create a chatbot as an intermediary between a coach and client, not to replace that essential human-centered piece, and I believe we came up with a solution. I look forward to carrying forward what I learned in this sprint of a weekend as I design for health in my career as a Designer & Researcher.
Finally, my best advice is don’t wait until you feel ready to test out your product ideas: find a hackathon you’re excited about and throw yourself into the experience, you won’t regret it. A resounding thank you to the organizers, judges, mentors, and awesome individuals who came together.
