The Beginning of Safe Space
It was a regular day at work. We were all going about our work as usual when Sharon (name has been changed) pinged a few of us on Skype saying she’s not sure what’s going on but she can’t breathe, her heart was racing and all she knew was…she had to finish this report in the next 30 minutes.
Sounds familiar? What we witnessed was our peer having a panic attack. We didn’t know what to do. The first reaction was to do a Google Search but here’s what you’d get..
- Institute of Mental Health — no one wants to go here
- Outpatient Clinics —Affordable but 3 hours wait-time.
- Private Hospitals — $220-$400 per hour, they can see you right now though
- Counselling Centres — Affordable but 1 month wait-time
If you were in this state, which option would you choose? The only thing she cared about was making her panic attack STOP, right now.
We brought her to Raffles Hospital and she paid $220-$400 per hour.
It worked, the counsellor was professional, calmed her down but she needed follow up sessions. If you were an executive, earning $3,000 per month and needed 4x sessions (let’s assume it’s $400), that’s $1,600 of your monthly salary dedicated to your counselling sessions =more than 50% of your salary. This option is not sustainable.
When we spoke to experienced counsellors, a lot of them had their own practice. However, they weren’t indexed properly on Google so their website never came up in the initial Google search.
For fresh graduates, holding a Master in Counselling from great universities, overall feedback was that there weren’t enough employment opportunities to hire them. How were they to clock their counselling hours to progress?
There’s a disconnect between the counsellors looking for clients, the people who need counselling services and with graduate counsellors looking for employment. This is why we built an early intervention counselling app that facilitates BOTH online and offline counselling. Human connection is still needed but lets improve the process by including Artificial Intelligence (A.I).
Meet Skye, our friendly A.I, whose only job is to to greet all troubled clients with empathy and match them to the most suitable counsellor.
Everyone deserves a Safe Space where they can get the help they need.
That’s why we created the Safe Space app (https://safespace.sg/).
Public launch in 2020.
