Communications of the ACM
A Rare Pandemic Silver Lining: Mental Health Start-Ups
Entrepreneurs are using teletherapy, metrics, and algorithms to address aspects of the mental health care system they view as broken.
Credit: Romy Blmel
Ariela Safira was on a mission. Shaken by the attempted suicide of a friend during her freshman year at Stanford University in 2013, Ms. Safira sought to understand the opaque mental health care system. She soon learned of the shortage of qualified therapists and, even where they are more plentiful, of the hurdles to obtaining care. Although a computer science and math major, she eventually enrolled in a clinical psychology graduate program at Columbia University.
But she kept coming back to a fundamental view: that there is often a mismatch between need and services, an essential supply-and-demand question. "It's very difficult to start and keep up a therapy business," Ms. Safira said. "It's a 10-person job, not a one-person job, from marketing yourself, doing your own financing and managing your own rent. But even before you get to a place where you manage all those things, what's so challenging is making a name for yourself so that people want to go to you."
And so, in 2019, she founded Real Therapy, a small business designed to tackle mental health and overall wellness by easing access and offering a range of services to answer clients' needs.
Driven by personal experience — and further motivated by the pandemic, which has caused an increase in anxiety and depression among the general population, including among young adults — entrepreneurs like Ms. Safira are focusing on addressing aspects of the mental health care system that they view as broken. They seem undeterred by the complicated nature of that system: a byzantine insurance process, a wide range of provider types, and elusive fits between patient and therapist.
From The New York Times
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