Um So hi everyone. My name is Jordan. And in this talk, I will try to take you on a journey um to see the mental health tech industry from the bird's eye.And after doing that, ask the toughest question anyone may ask, which is what does the future hold and can technology really help us become happier? Um And to start this conversation, I want to start with a few words about the mental tech industry evolution. Um So we started with traditional therapy. What we all imagine when we hear the term mental health, a room with a bunch of sofas and a psychotherapist. Though already in the sixties therapy, start therapists started offering mental health support through the phone. And in the seventies and eighties, a few software programs were created with the development of A PC. But it's true that it wasn't until the nineties that online therapy started to develop and to be honest, it took a while for these industries to form. Um And for us as audience to adopt it only around 2010 online therapy, like we all know it and companies like talkspace and Lyra and better help started to form and many new opportunities seem to be opening up in this market. Um And then came COVID, a few important things that COVID did to the mental health tech industry. So first, it created a massive need that was never seen before. And it was sometimes referred to as the pandemic. Behind the pandemic.

People were isolated and lonely and worried about their health and career and future. And according to the CDC report, in 2020 most us adults suffered from either stress, anxiety or some depression symptoms. Um And suicide became the second leading cause of death among 15 to 29 years old individuals. And this immense need was literally out there. Everyone was talking about it and it um the awareness grew and it really accelerated processes in the mental tech industry. Um and it also changed the way we look at mental health technologies from nice to have to a must have because that was the only way uh for mental health to reach us at home, which was extreme, extremely important for this industry. So the market responded uh with the VC investments, reaching almost $7 billion in 2021 and tech companies forming um reaching this peak of 20,000 mental health apps uh available in the market today according to the American Psychological Association Report, and more than 90% of us large employers today support mental health benefits.

That's also uh something that happened. Um Due to, to COVID because everyone realized that it's important and supporting employees is important. So, more than 20,000 mental health apps are in the market today. Why do we need so many? And what have we learned? So the first thing I think we've learned is that mental health is more than the absence of mental disorder. I love this sentence by the who because I think it really represents um what is the, the things that are happening in the market today? Because today mental health is about building our emotional resilience. And indeed many solutions we see today in the market, expand the term mental health, not just providing therapy to those in need, but also exploring other ways to provide help to the general population and to practice mental well being in, in in a whole new way. And let me just explain what I mean by that. Um So life is a journey. That's a cliche. Um But today many mental um well-being solutions are about supporting this journey. So in 2022 practicing our mental well being includes practicing our sleep finding techniques to reduce our overall stress, develop our career as an an an interpersonal skill, skills and work on our relationships with spouse and siblings and more. Um This is what we call preventative mental health.

And the mental tech industry supports this trend and I'll just give a few examples. So let's take peanut, peanut defined itself as a safe space for women to meet and find support around fertility, pregnancy, motherhood, and menopause. So all stages of being a woman and you can find experts if needed to support you uh like doulas and parenting experts and mental health professionals um and so forth. So they took this um uh experience of being a woman and they try to support us in each phase in the way. And let's take calm, for example, they, we all know calm. I don't need to um uh introduce them, but they focus on meditation and mindfulness, which alone can be considered preventative mental health care. But they do another thing. Uh Calm also conducted a research a few years ago that confirmed that many of their paying users use calm to go to sleep and they started offering a few tracks or, or app modes according to user goals and customize the experience according to their, to their wishes to their goals.

So this is another example of taking um our life goals and kind of breaking them down. Um And if we men sleep, sleep and mental health are closely related sleep deprivation can provide uh can provoke anxiety and depression. Um And improving our sleep is a key component of preventative mental health care. Um And it's a developing space with many new players entering the market like summaries which are FDA approved um and sleep reset and mind labs. And more, each of them takes a different approach and and tries to help a specific audience um deal with insomnia and lastly, um there's also a huge um niche of inclusive therapy. Um Many apps recently started providing uh solutions for specific, for specific audience that needs special care, uh like people of color or LGBT QQ plus community um and help them cope with their unique challenges, helping us as a society increase diversity and equity. So to sum this up, um the market today is definitely going to this direction, being more specific and accurate in one hand, but being more focused around one or two subjects help us as individuals develop a whole experience, a whole new life experience if you will. Um So a bit more specific, but in general, we get more diversity. Um more solutions and more options. Another huge trend in mental health is removing the barriers and stigma around mental health.

For decades, therapy was something people were ashamed of and taking medications were was a sign of going crazy. Um And it was a gradual change of opening up, but it started with the internet revolution forums, uh social media discussions and now community-based apps that help us melt the shame around this topic and talk about it a bit more. And this trend continues with more and more mental health um solutions providing a user experience that is very friendly and gamified and fun and they basically make us wanna practice. Um And, and it, it's something it began to be something fun that we all wanna participate, like these two examples of happy phi and headspace, but there are many more. Um So that's another trend. Um Now another important aspect. Uh If we wanna talk about the futuristic experience in mental health, um is the technology that we will be using. Traditionally, technology was used as a way to replace manual processes with automatic ones and offer the same products or services at scale. But when we talk about scale, mental health has already seemed like the hardest place to do that.

Um because scale means replacing human interaction with technology, but therapy really requires that human connection or or does it actually in recent years, mental health solutions found creative ways to scale, like offering some self-help tools, um text therapy, pre-recorded videos and more.

But I'm going to talk about the future and how this phase is changing dramatically in recent years. Um And of course, I talk about machine learning and natural language processing and how they are changing the industry. So there's a lot of research um conducted and a lot of money spent in this area and there are many encouraging results. Um And though we still cannot fully replace human therapy, uh we discovered it actually offers a lot of other advantages. Um for example, um chat bots and self-help tools are available 24 7. So if we experience anxiety in the middle of the night, they can help us through and it sometimes feels more confidential. Um starting a conversation with a bot. Uh A lot of times will not require any identifiable information. Um And A I in general provides more opportunities to learn things about ourselves. They learn our patterns and offer mood tracking and encourages us when we practice daily. Um And let's take we bo as an example, wot um it's an evidence based chatbot uh using known techniques such as C BT to help users deal with anxiety and depression completely without a human interface just to check. And they're conducting multiple studies to show efficacy and they actually have many good and and surprising results. Um And they help users improve um depression and anxiety. Um So they have great outcomes.

Um And as these technologies improve, uh the as and as this technology improves the market is growing and many big players are forming in this market like WSA and replica. Um WSA lately got an FDA approval to treat chronic pain and replica have also added this interesting feature of a 3D avatar uh that you can personalize and interact with. And that's another interesting layer of uh the future of these chat bots, 3d avatars and soul machines are basically taking our humanized bots to the next level to create a more, more emotional connection with a bot. And it's not science science fiction, it's, it's here. Um More players are are entering this market like cookie and replica that I already mentioned and we will be seeing more of that in the next decade. Um Vrar and the metaverse uh provide another interesting opportunity now to be fair experiments with VR already started back in the nineties. Um because psychologists were very intrigued by this technology um creating an alternative reality uh to the one patients are currently experiencing.

Um It, it provides endless therapy opportunities. Um So it's clear why they were intrigued. Um And in recent years as these technologies evolve, uh Thanks to meta and other big players in the market, we see more and more interesting players entering the space and I'll give you again just two examples. Um Just to open our mind to the future. Um So, Xr Health are working with occupational therapists, um physical therapists and mental health professionals to create a hybrid experience of VR combined with therapy sessions. Users actually meet a, a licensed therapist over a video once a week and they get a personalized VR exercises and, and games to practice between sessions. Um And they treat many core mental health uh um conditions like autism, a DH D substance abuse um and even stroke rehabilitation and memory decline issues and they're FDA approved and they're in network uh an in network provider. Um So they work with many of the big insurers uh like Blue Shields and Medicare. So that's one approach. The second approach is trip. Um It's a different angle. It's a VR platform um to help us relax, they use mindfulness and meditations.

Um And they created this gamified 3d journey of animations and sounds to help us relax. And the interesting part is that they're conducting research and working with hospitals and clinics to help patients improve the outcomes of of health pro procedures um like in patients undergoing chemotherapy or patients um in pre and post surgery conditions or um in rehab and so forth.

Um So this is an example um trip and many others um for this futuristic inpatient experience uh where instead of doctors and noisy devices, we will be able to log in to an alternative reality and just relax. So we talked about scale, we talked about alternative realities. Let's just um say a few words about data. Um Web three could possibly few more ways to analyze and create context around uh mental health data. Since it's about decentralizing the internet through Blockchain and NFT, it means that each one of us could own their own data um in a very um safe and encrypted way. And just imagine um how a mental health therapy would feel like if the therapist would get um information about us from multiple sources of cour of course, that we decide which information we provide them through A I tools. Um and they can analyze it. But if we do that, this itself can really improve the personalization of care. And if this is done by many people through the Blockchain, we get tons of new information in a private and encrypted way and that's by the way, true to health care in general. And there are many early stage start ups trying to innovate in this market and I'm sure we'll see more of that going on in, in the near future. Um And we're running out of time and I really want to leave a few minutes for questions.

So just to summarize um there is a huge range of solutions and technology, especially today. Um After 22 and 2020 COVID and mental health solutions are for everyone and everywhere, for each condition and for each life challenge and it can really help us prevent mental illness.

So there isn't really a reason why not to practice. And I would love to hear questions and if anyone wants to ask me questions in private, feel free to contact me through linkedin or email, I'll leave that on the screen. Personally. I'm a cognitive psychologist. I'm a web developer. And last year I founded my tech guru which was established to rev revolutionize mental health, mental well being um benefits that employers offer today.