Pro basketball player Giannis Antetokounmpo told GQ magazine last month that he and most of his Milwaukee Bucks teammates were seeing a sports psychologist. Antetokounmpo, a two-time regular season MVP and a finals MVP, revealed that he meets with the sports psychologist “almost every day.”
His comfort speaking about his mental health speaks to what may be the waning reduction in stigma associated with mental illness, and awareness of it, among Americans. In 2012, when asked to select the most important health issue in their lives, 3% of those surveyed answered “mental health;” in 2020, that number had risen to 13%. A number of factors are responsible for the shift, not least of which is the rise in the reported levels of mental distress: in a survey conducted in 2020, the Census Bureau said that 33% of Americans reported struggling with clinical anxiety or depression.
In the absence of federal or state mandates to solve this problem, the country has largely relied on market-based interventions. Thousands of companies promising solutions to addiction, anxiety, depression, or emotional well-being have emerged. Venture capitalists, who provided a total of $35.2 million for mental health startups in 2011, upped their ante in 2020, providing nearly $2.4 billion in funding.
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By nature, venture-capital-backed startups operate on an accelerated timeline. They’re encouraged to find an exit, typically measured as going public or getting acquired, within a very short window of time — ideally between five to seven years.
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Gatekeepers need to tame ‘Wild West’ of mental health and other digital health therapeutics
To better understand this business sphere, we interviewed academics, psychologists, founders, and C-suite executives. These in-depth conversations indicate that companies that are growing explosively — a common term for this is blitzscaling — in the mental health arena face three key blind spots:
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- a shortage of licensed clinical mental health therapists
- challenges in building a high-gross margin company
- the possibility of doing more harm than good.
Being attentive to these blind spots might inform entrepreneurs or investors who are in the arena or hope to enter it soon.
A dearth of therapists
Stephen Hays, a venture capitalist who invests exclusively in mental health start-ups, thinks the supply—demand imbalance is the key issue plaguing companies in this space. The demand for mental health therapy has increased, due to the reduction in stigma, with a bevy of tele-behavioral health companies promising to match people with providers. “But supply has stayed the same,” Hays notes. Who will these people get care from?
To compound the supply problem, many providers have been encouraged to set up their own practices — aided by companies such as Simple Practice, Alma, and Grow Therapy that promise to reduce their paperwork, provide technology-enabled tools, and credential them with insurance companies.
There are two interesting work-arounds here. One is to employ providers as full-time employees (W2s). The other is to build a culture that would motivate part-time providers (1099s) to join.
Kooth, a tele-behavioral health company focused on serving teenagers in the United Kingdom, is a big proponent of W2s. Tim Barker, the company’s CEO, told us why this made sense to him. “We employ providers. We give them stock incentive plans. We turn them into workplace professionals, and that means investing in their development too.” Kooth, having grown organically over the course of 20 years, bootstrapped its …….
Source: https://www.statnews.com/2021/12/28/mental-health-tech-blitzscaling-blind-spots/