Ask HN: Why don't startups try to disrupt the poor state of mental health? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Why don't startups try to disrupt the poor state of mental health?

12 pointstoroidfail16 comments

If even hackers are being affected by an epidemic of severe depression, why isn't there more silicon valley / venture capitalist interest in fixing America?

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Do you genuinely believe that VCs, a group of glorified financial services professionals, have anything but a cursory interest in "fixing America"?

After working in this space the past year [startup, behavioral health analytics] I believe there's hope for significant breakthroughs. As others have pointed out, it's a complicated space. Nonetheless entrepreneurs are working hard to bring innovation to market. More importantly [from what I've seen] there's genuine care for people who suffer from BH issues.

Short version: Mental health is incredibly complicated in terms of diagnosing and treating. A lot of the diseases share similar symptoms and they're still working on figuring out what separates conditions from one another and makes them unique / how to tell them apart. I.E. they moved Aspergers onto the autism spectrum rather than as a standalone condition recently.

Studying and treating mental health ultimately involves putting trained practitioners in a room with patients for a sustained period of time to accurately diagnose them and run studies to better understand their condition and how to treat it. Yes, we have some ways of managing conditions like Bipolar, but the diagnosis process is incredibly complex and very detailed to the point of requiring the treatment provider interact thoroughly with a large group of people to ensure an accurate diagnosis.

Ultimately, you want an extremely low rate of false positive diagnoses with regards to mental health issues and teasing apart the difference between the actual condition and someone exhibiting some symptoms due to other causes requires a lot of training and practice. I don't think much of that translates to the SV/VC model yet.

I can tell you from the innovator side of things behavioral health is producing more interesting start-ups than almost any other part of health tech. The money is slow in coming as the business model / monetization is still unclear - beyond simple out-of-pocket models. I have seen some amazing prototypes in the last few months including a fair number in the big data / predictive analytics space which seek to identify early signs of depression and other MH conditions.

Most have not yet formed into fundable startups but they will and I have seen leaps in terms of iterating around these ideas.

I can’t comment on the VC or investor side, but as a solopreneur I wouldn’t mind trying to tackle something in here since I live with depression.

However I don’t think we’re quite at that point yet where just a couple of kids with technology chops can tackle this adequately. Seems a lot of finesse, research and wealth of knowledge in this area is needed before a critical mass of startups can tackle this in the same fervor that you see in the sharing economy or even health and fitness trackers.

Startups often being 2 college buddies with a bright idea - healthcare is a tricky one because it can require credentials and legal expertise in the field. It's a lot safer to build a delightful todo app.

There's 7cups.com , there are some doing remote mental health consultations, and there are some apps/games for cognitive behavioral therapy.

There are also some doing more hardcore scientific stuff , like better diagnoses using eeg analysis, but those requires fda involvement , deep pockets , patience , deep knowledge , etc - so those innovations come from universities, when/if they come.

Also Alphabet is going to that field, it recruited a high official from the NIH in mental health. This again shows you how hard is to start such projects.

One of the drug companies recently paid a massive fine for falsifying research to justify selling their antidepressant to children:

http://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/glaxosmithkline-plead-guilty-a...

The big players have a lot of money invested in exactly-wrong theories and approaches to mental health.

Many researches do, some companies do, I also do https://medium.com/@kidargueta/building-an-emotional-artific... But the problem is that if you fix depression and anxiety then you also fix compulsive spending, need for drugs, etc, and then you will piss many VCs off.

These folks are trying to use a biofeedback approach to helping with executive function issues. http://www.myndlift.com/

One problem is: how does a consumer know that something will work?

Solving nearly intractable problems that primarily affect the poor, in an industry with extensive regulation and where most solutions require prolonged one-on-one contact?

Yeah, I can't imagine why a bunch of capitalists wouldn't jump at the opportunity.

Anyone interested in fixing mental health or actually all health needs to get a copy of "Black Box Thinking" by Matthew Syed. Any application will fail until the nature of information sharing has changed.

Either no one has figured out how to monetize mental illness with an app yet, or no one feels confident challenging the regulatory and legal prohibitions already in place. The pharmaceutical companies seem to be winning in this space.

Funnily enough, I just received an email promothing this: http://csplusmh.com/

It's very hard to scale, I think. And most mentally ill people have less money than average people.

For mostly good reasons there's heavy regulation.

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