Addressing Mental Health

The difficulty with mental health, and Psychology as a whole is that it’s intangible. Answer me this — How is your mental health? What metric did you try to use?

In physical health, we have metrics like measuring our weight by stepping on a scale or taking our temperature with a thermometer. These tools aren’t Ph.D. grade, but they give us a general idea of our health. Currently, we don’t have a way to measure our mental health. What’s more, we can’t measure the change in our mental health.

The more informed you are, the better decisions you can make. Our goal is to develop a household tool that allows you to understand your mental health, and quantify the impact your daily actions have on it. Hopefully, this helps people understand their personal situation, and allows them to take more control of their life.

Recently, there has been an emergence of digital mental health solutions that are accessible to everyone. For example, 7 Cups has connected 21 million people who were seeking emotional support with trained experts (see impact report). These solutions are on the rise because they are inexpensive, private, and easily accessible. Thought Path aims to be a new technology solution that helps you understand your mental health, and how your daily activities affect it. While my team and I can’t solve the entire issue, we feel as if it’s our duty to tackle a small portion in hopes to shake up the larger problem.

Below, I go into greater detail about the problem and what we’re doing to solve it, but if you don’t have time to read this entire blog, please skip to the “how you can help” section. As a community, we all have a role to play. 15 minutes of your time will help us towards our goal, improving mental health.

The Size of the Problem

Before we dive into it, I’d like to address why it’s difficult to quantify the size of this problem:

1. The criteria for what qualifies as a mental disorder is constantly changing; therefore, historical data can be inaccurate.
2. Many cases go undiagnosed due to a multitude of reasons: social pressure, lack of education, etc.

With that said, the NIMH estimates that 1 in 5 adults (43 million Americans) suffer from a diagnosable mental disorder. While not all mental disorders are debilitating, children are more susceptible to crippling symptoms. In fact, 20% of children suffer from serious disorders. To put this in perspective, 8% of children have asthma, and 0.2% have diabetes.

Think of five children that you personally know. One of them has a debilitating mental disorder. Similarly, 1 in 25 adults have a a debilitating mental disorder.

How much does this cost?

While I hate associating a dollar value to mental health, it’s a necessary statistic because the health care industry is a business. Financially, it behooves us all to find a solution to mental health, which is estimated to cost the United States $6 trillion by 2030. Businesses also have a stake in the matter. They lose an estimated $193 billion a year due to mental health “conflicts” with their employees (Insel, 2008).

“The costs for mental disorders were greater than the costs of diabetes, respiratory disorders, and cancer combined.” — NIMH (2010)

To make this worse, the majority of the people who suffer from mental health disorders are the ones who can’t afford it: 46% of homeless, 20% of prisoners, and 70% of youth in the juvenile system. In 2014, only 41% of adults who suffered from a mental health disorders were able to access treatment.

How you can help:

We want to get this right, so we’re following the design thinking process, which relies heavily on interviews. In short, the more people we talk to, the better we can understand the problem. We’re hoping to speak to people who are:

1. Diagnosed- if you’ve been medically diagnosed with a mental health disorder, or regularly see a professional
2. Undiagnosed, but aware- If you have identified symptoms of a mental disorder, but have not visited a professional
3. No History- If you have little to no experience with mental health
4. Professional experience- If you are a trained professional who engages with the subject of mental health regularly

If you fall into one of the above, please consider signing up for a conversation here. We promise to keep it short and completely confidential. Feel free to enter an alias when signing up to ensure your privacy.

Stay up to date:

We have a busy, but exciting few months ahead of us. If you’d like to stay up to date, please sign up for our email list here, and follow us on social media where we’ll announce our research results, beta test, and other progress reports.

Thank you all for your support. Your feedback and questions are always welcome.

With love,

Asher