Why start a company focused on mental health? It’s a good question and a great subject for our first blog post. At a 10,000 foot level, we think that online consumers' needs are not very well met and that many people are looking for answers to real offline problems.
Widespread Problem – The incidence of mental illness is much more widespread than most people might think. The World Health Organization estimates that 1 of 4 US adults experience a mental health illness during the course of a year. Despite the large amount of mental health illnesses, three quarters of the individuals with an illness do not seek professional treatment.
Social Stigma – Mental health is one of those topics that is not widely discussed. While there are many reasons for this – access to healthcare, costs, motivation, beliefs – one of the primary drivers is the negative stigma sometimes associated with mental health treatment.
Professional Confusion – Mental health treatment remains one of the most contentious fields in medicine. There is widespread disagreement between different professional groups about what actually works for various mental health problems. Even if you normalize your professional sampling to one group, you’ll find significant disagreement in terms of what type of treatments are recommended depending on who you see. As a consumer, the situation can be highly confusing.
We think that David Brendel sums it up best in his recent book “Healing Psychotherapy: Bridging the Science/Humanism Divide” when he writes:
“The human sciences at the beginning of the twenty-first century remain mired in a quite serious and abiding conceptual crisis. Nowhere is this crisis more urgent than the area in which I practice, psychiatry, which faces an ongoing ethical challenge to define what it means to be a human subject in an increasingly scientific era of genetics, neurobiology, and psychopharmacology-and in a fast paced world that craves self-help books and that seeks the kind of quick fix that popular television psychologists dispense to millions of their viewers each day. Thoughtful, deliberative, tentative accounts of human experience and suffering are hard to come by these days.”
The Internet is ubiquitous, private, and able to bring coherence to large amounts of data. Although our website is not live yet, we think that our approach may have a reasonably good chance of fundamentally improving the field of mental health for the world by better informing common questions about what works for different types of problems.