Masawa Minute 33
This is the Masawa Minute — mental wellness, social impact, and impact investing snippets on what we’re pondering + where you can get active.
This week’s newsletter is focused on the experiences in our daily lives — coping with the first year of the pandemic and beyond, talking about mental health struggles, trying to reduce our stress. We hope you take away something valuable and have a restful and recharging weekend!
Masawa Thoughts
We’ve been working hard behind the scenes over the past few months, building out the team, fine-tuning our Nurture Capital approach, and identifying and assessing investment opportunities.
There are two opportunities with great founders that are fire hot 🔥. We want to give you the chance to invest alongside Masawa:!
- a company with two digital therapeutic games supporting children in better understanding and dealing with anxiety and stress;
- an evidence-based digital companion to help you learn better smartphone habits.
While unique in their respective markets, they both share a systems approach to increasing mental wellness and focusing on and are looking at prevention rather than late cure.
Interested? Just let us know by responding to this email and we’ll share teasers, memos, and lots of analyses!
Attend
Shift to a Wellbeing Economy: Putting the health of people and planet first
The economic system as it is right now is unjust and unsustainable — with it, we will never be able to create an environment for everyone to thrive and for the world to recover. That’s why looking into alternative approaches is crucial. Wellbeing Economy centers health and wellbeing of people and the planet and is driven by holistic thinking rather than chasing short-term profit.
This event marks a launch of a petition to shit to a Wellbeing Economy both in the UK and globally. Tomorrow, April 1st, at 7.00 pm CEST, join leading politicians, experts and activists to explore what exactly it would mean for us and how we can get involved. If you’re based in the UK or/and interested in the Wellbeing Economy, don’t miss it!
What we’re reading…
🌴 Wellness apps are everywhere — what’s next?
The supply of wellness apps has exploded in recent years, which we’re of course thrilled about — they’re narrowing the wellness accessibility gap and helping a lot of people gain more control of their wellbeing. This makes a lot of sense as, since the start of the pandemic, our lives have largely shifted indoors or, more precisely, onto our screens, and the world has become overwhelmingly stressful.
To put this into perspective, during the last year, the mindfulness and meditation app Calm has doubled its customer base giving access to more than 10 million additional customers. The company’s value recently exceeded $2 billion after securing an additional investment of $75 million from venture capital. The soaring demand proves that this kind of service is needed right now, but there’s a business case for it as well — a Harvard study found that there’s a 6-to-1 return on investment in employee wellness. For every dollar invested, medical costs are reduced by $3.27, while the absenteeism-related costs drop as well.
However, there’s another side to this success. The pay disparities prevalent in Silicon Valley are growing further, exacerbating the creation of race and class hierarchies. There are a lot of companies, both tech industry giants and newcomers, that are profiting from the public’s desperate need to reduce stress, earning up to tens of billions of dollars, while their own workers struggle in gruesome working conditions and toxic working environments.
It’s great to see the topic of wellness and stress reduction make its way into the public discourse and gain so much attention due to the challenges of the pandemic, but we mustn’t stop there. We need to start shifting away from reactive, emergency-response care and instead start building sustainable, equitable, inclusive systems that will allow all of us to thrive in the long run.
📆 How are we doing a year into the pandemic
Mental Health Foundation has conducted a study to get a better picture of how are we doing since our lives have been forced to conform to ever-changing sets of rules, and we had to learn to live in the state of ongoing uncertainty about ourselves, our health, our world and the prospects of tomorrow. What have they discovered?
One of the significant findings is that we’re less anxious, but more lonely. We have learned to live with the pandemic and have gotten more used to the new circumstances, yet we’re longing for human connection, which is essential for coping with difficulties — its prolonged absence negatively affects our mental wellbeing. Our ability to cope with stress is also deteriorating — in April 2020 in the UK 73% of adults said they were coping well, while in February 2021, this number stood at 64%. While the study by no means reflects the experiences of everyone, it signals that for many of us, the upcoming months will remain challenging and unpredictable.
The findings have been used by many public, government and international organizations and institutions to improve their Covid-19 responses and shared with the Uk policymakers. Among the key objectives of the study was to identify what was going on across the UK and which groups were most affected, so that targeted support measures could be developed to help the vulnerable groups. It also calls for coordinated action on mental health from all the government decision-makers across the board and formal commitment to consider mental health in all the policies that are being developed. Supporting mental health not just with theory but with direct action has never been more critical than it is now.
Pandemic one year on: landmark mental health study reveals mixed picture
📞 Do we talk about mental disorders too much?
Mental health is making its way into the conversations more and more often. With it, the psychiatric terminology is seeping into our vocabularies and, while driven by good intentions, distorting the image of mental health, making us forget it’s a nuanced spectrum instead of a clear-cut box.
Things we might see as symptoms of mental disorders like low mood, worry, deteriorating eating habits, delusions, are experienced by the whole population to a bigger or smaller extent. It varies from person to person how severe it is, how much control they have over it, how long it lasts, making it extremely difficult to find an objective border between temporary distress and a disorder. Some psychologists even argue that terms like “illness” shouldn’t be used at all, but instead, the symptoms should be judged in terms of degree.
That’s not to say that people who consider their symptoms of distress mild or passing shouldn’t speak up and seek help — they absolutely should. The goal is to find a way to talk about these feelings and experiences without sending the message that there’s something dysfunctional about you for feeling that way. In other words, we should learn that psychological distress doesn’t necessarily mean a health problem and that a great deal of these experiences can be managed without having to reach for a medical dictionary.
We need to talk more about the whole range of negative symptoms so that we know what a severe mental disorder looks like and what can help and understand that we’re not alone in our pain, sadness or worry. And while we still need care and support, maybe even professional one, we don’t necessarily need the language of disorder. Mental health, just like our lives, cannot offer simple answers and the sooner we realize it, the better we’ll become at learning how to nurture it best.
What we’re getting wrong in the conversation about mental health
🧘♂️ Healthier people, happier lives
Happify Health, a New York-based digital therapeutics startup, has just raised $73 million of funding in series D. The round was led by Deerfield Management Company, an investment firm focused on advancing healthcare with the goals of curing disease, improving quality of life and reducing the cost of care. Other notable investors included Omega Capital Partners and ION Crossover Partners, next to the already existing ones.
Happify Health, founded in 2012, is a company that builds app-based tools based on cognitive behavioral therapy and mindfulness, including a catalog of digital therapeutics targeting mental health and chronic health needs as well as coaching services, both live and assisted by AI. It offers several topic-based tracks — month-long programs covering the areas of relationships, work, finances, developing resilience, cultivating mindfulness and so on.
While currently, the company has a paid consumer-targeted app, it’s placing increasingly more focus on building stronger partnerships with pharmaceutical companies and healthcare providers. At the moment, the partnerships include four major national health plans and five pharmaceutical companies resulting in valuable collaborations — for example, in 2019, they struck a deal with Sanofi to develop a digital therapeutics tool for people with multiple sclerosis. Happify Health will direct the capital towards supporting growth in key areas across the entire platform, accelerate the operations and pursue global business development opportunities. We say congratulations!
Digital therapeutics platform Happify Health raises $73M
💉 The vaccine distribution is deepening the racial disparities
In the US, the people of color have been disproportionately affected by the Covid-19 pandemic, they’ve seen their mental health deteriorate further than an average person, and now they’re receiving a smaller share of the vaccines available in the US. For every ten White people vaccinated, only five Black people get the shot, and the gap for Hispanic people is even larger.
Observing this situation and noticing these big discrepancies by race and ethnicity is distressing. It’s clear that while the reported race and ethnicity of vaccinated people is influenced by who’s eligible to get a vaccine, this isn’t the complete explanation for these gaps. As the US has accelerated the vaccination campaign, by now, close to 30% of the citizens have received at least one dose of the vaccine. Yet, there are still significant obstacles preventing people from accessing it.
Public health experts have noted that less flexible schedules preventing people from taking any available openings, lack of easily accessible transportation to the vaccination sites, difficulty obtaining reliable information are all among the reasons why Black and Hispanic people are excluded from the vaccination process. And while these data points and observations focus on the US, the problems apply to the entire world — it’s easy to imagine the parallel plight of marginalized groups in other countries, when/if they do get (more) vaccines.
This only exacerbates the already deep divide and holds up the social inequality and injustice. Not only is it largely detrimental for the wellbeing, mental and physical, of the affected groups, but also hinders the progress of our society as a whole. In a face of the pandemic and in general, we should do better.
Pandemic’s Racial Disparities Persist in Vaccine Rollout
In Closing
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Gabija works as a Marketing & Communications Coordinator at Masawa. She lets her vision of a more just, sustainable, equitable world guide Masawa’s story and inform the work towards transforming global mental wellness to make it accessible and accepted.
