Making mental health knowledge accessible (Part I)
An interview with Athel Hu, Founder, Mentidote.
Mental health issues such as depression, anxiety or past trauma can be debilitating for those who experience them, and often suitable avenues to deal with these issues may not be easily available or accessible.
Athel Hu, realised this and combined her professional knowledge and passion in the area of mental health care to create a mental health social enterprise called Mentidote. In Part I of this two-part interview, Athel talks about the origins behind Mentidote and some of the important lessons learnt in her early entrepreneurial journey.
Q: Could you tell us more about Mentidote and how the motivation behind founding the social enterprise came about?
A: Mental health has been an interest ever since I was an undergraduate. I would say my late mum was the key source of inspiration. Then, I was battling cancer with my late mum throughout the whole period of my undergraduate studies. I saw how my mum, though she suffered from multiple episodes of aggressive breast cancer, was able to remain mentally well throughout. That piqued my interest.
And I was able to get to learn more about mental health when I took a module on health and social behaviour in my honours year. Since then I endeavoured to pursue my postgraduate studies related to mental health, though I was doing more of ageing research and teaching at the start of my career. Eventually, I found my direction to embark on a Masters degree in Counselling.
I felt a spiritual calling to eventually develop and teach mental health at higher institutions where I spent the most part of my career in, after having observed how individuals experience poor mental well-being, as a result of broken family and interpersonal relationships, yet they do not know how and where they should seek help from.
The real calling came at the beginning of 2020, the same semester I launched a module on mental health at NUS where I was teaching with. Just so happened that COVID-19 hit and I felt that mental health education shouldn’t be confined just to academic setting but such knowledge should also be made available to the public.
My founding principle of Mentidote was that mental health knowledge should be accessible to the members of public, and also based on the assumption that education is often more palatable to people than “counselling” and “therapy”, given the nature of mental health stigma. I wanted to play a part in the mental health space by leveraging on my strength in teaching. And so I left my job and embark on this journey of starting Mentidote — a name that is formed by “Menti” and “dote” to carry the idea of doting on one’s mental well-being.
Q: What were some of the highs and lows of running Mentidote so far? What would you say were the most important lessons learnt?
A: Despite the fact that I knew I have zero business background and can’t see myself as an entrepreneur, I think I had a lot of faith at the beginning, thinking that since God called me to do this, it will surely work. It still holds through now after one year. But this one year has taught me that we just need to start, and people who believe in your work will come alongside to help you along. Learning curve has been extremely steep!
I literally grew a lot more white hair this year. Haha! I would say the low would be that I really didn’t enjoy the part of having to prove myself to people just to get business because somehow you know you have it within you, and also sometimes wondering when will payment come and if people will bail on you. Some days you can’t help but feel some sort of identity crisis wondering if I had overestimated myself too much thinking that I produce quality work that people will appreciate.
But I have come to realize that they are myriad reasons why partnerships do not happen. Perhaps sometimes it really is all a matter of budget constraints on their part, and not so much to do with my abilities.
As for the highs, in a similar vein, it’s been a privilege being able to meet and work with some of the kindest souls in social service and social enterprise sectors. I think they debunked my understanding of how I used to believe that business and business process are usually purely utilitarian. You’re just really grateful to them for giving you the opportunity to kickstart you in the whole process of running a social enterprise.
I’m also extremely grateful to many of my ex-students who believed in my work. In fact I got a few projects because of them. And all those encouragement they sent along on days when you don’t even know if what you do matters. Without all of them, Mentidote probably wouldn’t be running up till now.
Stay tuned for Part II of the interview!
