- Tech startups are coming out with a range of new tools designed to tackle depression and anxiety.
- Some are revamping existing wellness apps so they can be used to diagnose conditions like depression and PTSD; others are expanding the range of mental health services they provide by adding the ability to prescribe drugs.
- All of these efforts are motivated by a central idea: that too many people who need help aren't getting it.
The tragic rise in suicide in America has struck a chord with tech startups focused on mental health.
Driven in some cases by the death of a family member or friend, some CEOs and founders are revamping existing wellness tools — such as apps that help spot and manage stress — to create new versions designed to diagnose depression. Other platforms are expanding the range of mental health services they provide so that a therapist you once texted about your anxiety can also prescribe you medication.
All of these efforts share a common motivation: the belief that too many people who need help aren't getting it.
While suicide isn't always tied to depression, the two issues frequently overlap. Of the roughly 20% of Americans who have a mental illness, close to two-thirds are estimated to have gone at least a year without treatment.
That reality has led startup founders like Tom Insel, who once led the National Institutes of Mental Health and now heads a company called Mindstrong Health, to attempt to create solutions.
"We don't have objective, precise measures of mental health like we do for diabetes or hypertension," Insel told Business Insider last month. He hopes a new app will help solve that problem.
Here are six app-based services that are working to address these problems.
With backing from Olympic swimmer Michael Phelps, a company called Medibio is using sleep and heart rate data from your Fitbit or Apple Watch to spot a depressive episode.
Despite racking up 28 Olympic medals — an unparalleled achievement that made swimmer Michael Phelps the most recognized Olympian in US history — Phelps was fighting powerful episodes of depression that led him to contemplate taking his own life.
"I straight wanted to die," Phelps told CNN's David Axelrod on a recent episode of The Axe Files podcast.
Phelps' personal struggle spurred him to join the board of a 23-year-old company called Medibio. The group has a bold goal: to create a tool that can detect mental illness objectively, without relying on mercurial measures like questionnaires.
"The problem with mental health today is that there's no objective diagnosis," Jack Cosentino, Medibio's CEO, told Business Insider in June.
In contrast to that approach, Medibio uses your wearable and smartphone to collect data on measurable health factors like your heart rate and sleep. The data is fed into an app which gives you a numerical score showing whether you're likely to be entering into a period of high-stress or mental vulnerability.
A version of Medibio's technology is already available to consumers, but the company is also working on a more advanced version of the app that could detect depression. Medibio presented that new version to the Food and Drug Administration last month.
Mindstrong Health's approach is to analyze how you type and scroll on your phone to detect mental illness.
Mindstrong Health, the Silicon Valley startup led by former National Institutes of Mental Health director Tom Insel, is working on pinpointing mental illness by collecting data on how you type, tap, and scroll on your smartphone.
Mindstrong's app, which hasn't yet been finalized, is designed to run in the background of your smartphone and pick up on how long you take to find something from a list like your contacts, which way you scroll, and how quickly you type.
The company calls this "digital phenotyping."
Mindstrong hasn't yet revealed how the ways you use your phone could indicate a particular condition, and the startup is still exploring the direction it might take its product. But Insel said they may first make the app available to an internal group of psychiatrists and social workers in the company who will work with several hundred patients to see how the platform works in real time.
"We have a passive, objective way of measuring how you're thinking that takes advantage of a technology that all of us are using all the time," Insel said.
Wall Street's favorite meditation app, Headspace, is working on a prescription-strength version of the app.
The $250 million mindfulness app company Headspace has plans to turn meditation into medicine.
A favorite self-improvement tool in Silicon Valley and on Wall Street, the app already has 30 million users. In June, by way of a new subsidiary called Headspace Health, the company announced that it will soon be rolling out a handful of prescription-grade meditation tools.
Headspace has not yet revealed which specific health condition the product is intended to treat, but Megan Jones Bell, the company's chief science officer, told Business Insider last month that it would "likely surprise a lot of people."
Headspace is starting clinical trials of the tool this summer. The company aims to get FDA approval for its first digital health product by 2020.
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