This 12-Week Mental Health Program Lives in Your Phone
Meru Health offers a 12-week, app-based treatment program for mental health challenges, combining cognitive behavioral therapy, nutritional psychiatry, mindful eating, and meditation exercises. CEO Kristian Ranta explains how personal tragedy led him to this work.
By S.C. Stuart
One in five US adults experience mental illness each year, but only 41 percent of them get help, according to the National Alliance on Mental Illness. A stigma remains, the cost is often prohibitive, and taking that first step can feel overwhelming.
Kristian Ranta, CEO of Meru Health, knows this all too well. His brother Peter died by suicide, which prompted Ranta to pursue work that could empower people with mental health challenges. The result is Meru, an app-based treatment program supported by licensed therapists.
The 12-week program includes traditional cognitive behavioral therapy but also nutritional psychiatry, mindful eating, and meditation exercises. We spoke to Ranta about bringing a mellow, European sensibility to the tech industry (Meru is co-located in Palo Alto and Finland), as well as his days as a heavy metal guitarist. Here are edited and condensed excerpts from our conversation.
PCMag: Kristian, explain how the Meru Health platform works and the scientific modalities behind it.
Kristian Ranta: The Meru Health solution is based on three evidence-based [therapies]: cognitive behavioral therapy, mindfulness-based interventions, and behavioral activation, delivered via an app with support from remote licensed therapists and psychiatrists. The program itself is structured around 12 weekly themes which build upon each other and we track outcomes at each stage.
Your platform incorporates an anonymous peer group. Explain how that works and how you ensure anonymity?
No real names or identifying visuals are used to avoid disclosing identity. When people complete their daily practice, they can post on the wall for others to see, and respond to different reflective questions that the platform poses on different themes. There’s no cross talk or commenting functionality. They can send emoticons or pre-defined empathy statements to others within the peer group, which show up on the wall, and our therapists are always monitoring the group. It’s a supportive mechanism, but we are careful to protect the group members.
Prior to Meru Health, you founded two other health-related businesses back in your native Finland. Yet you decided to move to Silicon Valley and go through Y Combinator. What did you learn most there?
True. I’ve built healthcare businesses since I was 25 (I’m now 38). I founded my first company in diabetes, a medical device company and glucose monitoring, and then eventually sold that business in 2015 to a Korean public company. But the Y Combinator experience was vital. We got exposed to great networks and formed really important, vital connections that gave us the ability to learn from early customers before going to market.
And along the way you became famous in Finland as a musician?
[ Laughs] Yes, I was the guitarist for the metal band Norther.
Many of the musicians I know here in L.A. are much happier onstage than off.
I can totally relate to that. In creativity, there’s a power, an energy, seeking for ways to express itself. I’ve found that if you don’t keep it flowing it can be destructive. I quit the band in 2011 to dedicate myself to the startup world, but I still identify as a creative person.
At Meru Health, who are your main customers and how much does the platform cost? Are you hoping workplaces will deploy it, and how are you tracking outcomes for them?
Doctors recommend us to their patients, as do employers, and we are paid through the insurer or a self-insured employer.
For clarity, how is Meru Health connected to your former startup Blooming?
Blooming is essentially the same company, but we pivoted from being focused on prevention to becoming a clinical provider through a software platform. That’s what customers were looking for, basically. Prevention is cheaper and effective, but the market wants medical treatment.
On that note, Meru Health just received $4.2 million in funding. What was it about your pitch that investors really responded to?
The biggest feedback was that we have actual clinical research and medically based evidence to ensure our platform’s future success. Essentially, unlike a lot of other apps in this space, our investors felt we were on a different path, by publishing reputable research and working closely with the medical community in a B2B model.
Where does the company name come from? Meru is a Sanskrit word, right?
We chose it for two reasons. Yes, it’s Sanskrit, and stands for the metaphysical mountain in ancient scriptures where the gods reside. But IRL, it’s the summit of a mountain range in India, in the Himalayas. [It’s] tougher to climb than Everest but was recently conquered. For us, it represents a peak-a challenge-in our case, for mental health.
Mental health is a big challenge for many people. Without prying into a painful aspect of your personal life, your brother, Peter, decided to take his own life. Was it this tragedy that started your quest into mental health software?
He did and his death left a huge hole in my life, but it’s important for me to continue to talk about as I believe it’s part of relieving the stigma around mental illness. After Peter died, I slowly started developing this need to help empower people with mental health challenges.
What’s your relationship to mental health-and activities to sustain it-today?
I’ve gone through psychotherapy myself, and it’s extremely useful. I also started meditating on a daily basis eight years ago and have found it to be true that it changes your psychology but also your physiology. But because I’m primarily an engineer and computer scientist, I wanted to bring everything I’ve learned in the medical and scientific world into a program which could scale and be measurable/quantifiable and proven through clinical research, such as our recently released study.
Industry validation is crucial for any med-tech startup. Tell us about your current trial at Stanford Medicine and the VA Palo Alto Health Care System.
We’ve just completed the first leg of the trial and are now recruiting for the second trial, looking towards publishing the results later this year or early next year. I can tell you more then, but we’re really satisfied with the progress so far.
Are you using AI?
You know, a lot of people in this space say they’re using AI, but they’re not really, not in its truest sense. We have deployed advanced analytics and machine learning to understand the correlations of usage patterns, symptomatologies, but there’s no actual AI today. Later down the line, in our roadmap, we’ll bring it in, but we figured there’s so much more value to be created in understanding everything ourselves while developing an electronic medical record dashboard and analytics for our providers for now.
On your site, you note that 50 percent of workplace attrition is due to burnout and depression and this costs companies $8,500 per talented employee. Are you also designing a platform to ensure the workplace is a non-toxic environment?
That’s a great idea, and I agree with you, there’s a huge need to address the mental health piece in a much more complete fashion.
It would be great if someone built a self-reporting tool to report on unhealthy workplaces-tracking problem executives who are screamers/abusers; monitoring air quality; teaching correct body alignment at sit/stand desks; checking how many hours employees are working without breaks, and so on.
The piece that we’re doing at Meru Health which fits into such “workplace sanity” is around “nutritional psychiatry,” where we educate the users on the fact we’re human beings, not just a mind versus the body, and the impact of the food we eat, and the environment we exist in, is crucial to our mental health.
So you’re teaching people to self-regulate away from sad snacking?
Mindful eating is an important component of Meru Health. We’re teaching people how to distinguish between cravings and real hunger; how different nutrients impact mental well-being and why processed food is detrimental to overall health. We know through research that certain populations, exhibiting depressive symptoms, are actually deficient in zinc, B12, magnesium, and Vitamin D. We want to help people start to read labels and address mental health as a holistic challenge.
In your executive brainstorms back in Finland, are you looking to build something beyond a mobile app? Perhaps like Philip K. Dick’s Penfield Mood Organ or VR digiceuticals?
I’m a big believer in intervention-style behaviors and precision medicine to help people become more self-regulatory and improve their mental health. We have many exciting ideas on the horizon in this area.
Originally published at https://www.pcmag.com on May 23, 2019.
