There is a mental health crisis; awareness is building but it needs to be fixed now!

There is a problem…

World Mental Health Day 2019 will evidently create more awareness around poor mental health than ever before. But, are we not just getting tired of the majority of articles and stories being focused on awareness? We are in crisis.

There are more than 300 million people worldwide suffering from depression. It’s the leading cause of illness and disability in the world, taking more than 800,000 lives each year.

Simply, looking at those stats, awareness just isn’t good enough anymore. We need action.

What is being done?

Headlines about NHS waiting times for mental health services are not hard to find. Awareness has led to many more people presenting with issues, and combined with a huge loss in mental health staff and cuts to services has meant that waiting times are not getting any better any time soon. And the private sector? Cost can be prohibitive for many, but therapists are often just as booked out as in the NHS.

Can technology come to the rescue?

Innovative technologies are already addressing these problems by revolutionising how mental health treatments can be accessed at scale, effectively bypassing the need for waiting times and driving down the cost to the patient.

This has led to a boom in the Wellness tech market, but the app stores are saturated by highly generic applications and services, with nothing that was truly tailored to the needs of an individual user. Their design, user experience and content tended towards well trodden “wellness” tropes, sweeping cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) generalisations and unnecessary gamification that, while sometimes clinically appropriate, requires diagnosis as well as high degrees of user engagement and motivation to be any way near effective.

These were things that Adam, our CEO, didn’t have when he had his own mental health crisis. Having a lifelong fascination with tech, and being involved in the industry for over 15 years, Adam turned to the apps stores for help. What he discovered was a vast number of apps all of which would not of prevented him getting worse and reaching his crisis point.

Seeing a gap in the market for a predictive, passive and personalised approach to stop people becoming ill, Well Good was born.

Wellness done Good

Simply put, Wellgood.io is developing mental health care tech to prevent people from reaching crisis. Too many are too far along the path of poor mental health when they look for help. Well Good is being created to keep people healthy in the first place, but for those that are already unwell, to prevent them from reaching rock bottom.

By linking AI with data, Well Good’s ultimate goal is to actively guide our users towards improving their mental health, tailoring each interaction to exactly what they need, when they need it.

We are about to embark upon a research and development phase with some exciting partners (to be announced), and we’re currently looking for investment to help us as we move towards our MVP, but Well Good is founded on the idea that community, collaboration and conversation fuels our creativity and insight.

So if you want to talk or find out more, just drop us a line or sign up to our mailing list.