
Ask HN: Why don't startups try to disrupt the poor state of mental health? - toroidfail
If even hackers are being affected by an epidemic of severe depression, why isn&#x27;t there more silicon valley &#x2F; venture capitalist interest in fixing America?
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askafriend
Do you genuinely believe that VCs, a group of glorified financial services
professionals, have anything but a cursory interest in "fixing America"?

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deboboy
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.

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floppydisk
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.

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Arbinv
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.

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eswat
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.

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jakejake
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.

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petra
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.

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tcj_phx
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...](http://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/glaxosmithkline-plead-guilty-and-
pay-3-billion-resolve-fraud-allegations-and-failure-report)

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

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carlos_argueta
Many researches do, some companies do, I also do
[https://medium.com/@kidargueta/building-an-emotional-
artific...](https://medium.com/@kidargueta/building-an-emotional-artificial-
brain-motivations-71500556bbbe#.yobra6mvo) 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.

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

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

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giaour
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.

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cvanvliet
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.

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gregjor
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.

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dennybritz
Funnily enough, I _just_ received an email promothing this:
[http://csplusmh.com/](http://csplusmh.com/)

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cm2012
It's very hard to scale, I think. And most mentally ill people have less money
than average people.

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DanBC
For mostly good reasons there's heavy regulation.

