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Five female founded mental health start-ups to watch
We list some of the best female-founded mental health apps
As the femtech world and wellness industry start to combine. We explore the mental health apps, startups and female-founded businesses you need to know.
Mental health conditions, especially after two years of pandemic restrictions and lockdowns, are on the rise. It is estimated that 1 in 4 people in England will experience some form of mental health issue such as depression or anxiety each year.
Spiritune
Spiritune combines principles of neuroscience and music therapy to inspire positive mental health outcomes. It aims to help reduce stress while increasing emotional regulation, productivity and performance through the music-based app.
The app was created by Jamie Pabst after she struggled with her own stress levels while working in the finance industry in New York. She realised the lack of accessible resources and wanted to create something impactful. The company highlights that headphones can become health tools allowing people to support their emotional health and perform better.
Jamie wrote: “Music is one of the most powerful stimuli that addresses the brain networks that underlie stress, emotions, motivation and reward. My vision to combine the effectiveness of music therapy and the accessibility of audio to help people better manage stress drove the creation of Spiritune.
Appreciating the role our auditory system plays in our health through my mom’s hearing loss, and understanding the significance of music in neurological function through my sister’s pursuits in music therapy, I am dedicated to bringing the vast benefits of music to people and organizations globally to create better health outcomes.”
It also offers a workplace setting that can help employers to boost productivity and employee well-being.
Thymia
Thymia is a health tech company with a difference founded by CEO Emilia Molimpakis.
Thymia researchers developed a game based on neuropsychology combined with facial micro-expression analysis and speech pattern analysis to make faster mental health assessments. Its’s system allows clinicians a fun and engaging way to monitor their patient’s health. The game records subtle differences that doctors may miss and it also offers a way to monitor patients from home.
The app may have increased benefits for women in that it is also being developed to search for early signs of Alzheimer’s and Parkinsons’ Disease. Although both diseases affect both sexes, studies show Alzheimer’s is more prevalent in women. This is reversed when it comes to Parkinson’s Disease as men are 1.5 times more likely to develop the condition. However, women have a higher mortality rate and faster progression of the disease.
Speaking with Health Tech World, Emilia said: “In the patient’s view, they are just interacting with beautifully animated screens. However, what we are doing on the backside is where we are looking for specific patterns of behaviour because depression is associated with differences in cognitive function, psychological and behavioural patterns. Put all of those together and you get a signature for depression, Alzheimer’s or Parkinson’s.”
Thymia secured €920k at the end of June 2021 from investors to help grow the company.
Moody Month
While practising good mental can be essential for every day of the month, there are times when it may be a little more difficult than others.
Pre-menstrual stress (PMS) can cause mood swings, tension, anxiety or depression. It can also cause social withdrawal and irritability. Although people with periods will recognise the start of their period, it can be tricky to know what is PMS or what may be depression or anxiety.
Moody Month, founded by Amy Thomson, helps users to receive a forecast of information on what is happening in their bodies each day. Amy was inspired to create the app after her periods stopped due to stress, travel and burn-out while working in event management in London. She began searching for answers but was shocked to find a severe lack of information available for women. She also felt that period tracking apps stopped short at providing long term care for the entire cycle.
The app can help users to optimise their well-being by changing their mood, food and following fitness advice. It also tracks your hormonal cycle to better understand your moods and symptoms making it easier to recognise when it may be PMS. The more information input to Moody Month, the better the app is able to track and deliver information.
The best part?
The app is free unless you purchase something when using it.
Heart it out
Femtech products or solutions are often designed after founders become frustrated by a gap not addressed in women’s healthcare. When it comes to mental health start-up, Heart It Out, that’s exactly what happened.
Nithya J Rao became concerned by the lack of psychologists practising in India which led to the creation of the platform. The result was a data-driven platform that can help to train psychologists for 16 weeks before they meet a patient. It also offers therapy to address issues such as depression and anxiety.
The startup also launched a free helpline called Briefly during lockdown which aimed to provide access to a network of 27 volunteers psychologists. They went on to help more than 600 patients with trauma and anxiety.
Patients can self-refer themselves through the platform for a number of different therapies including couple, family and child services. It also offers a ‘supervision’ service where professionals can join two or more psychology professionals in a continuous, collaborative, and supportive process. It aims to facilitate the exploration, monitoring and enhancement of professional functioning.
The website states: “Heart It Out began humbly as a ‘Room on the Roof’ in a quaint neighbourhood, providing a safe space for people to talk their hearts out. Today, it is a tech platform poised to provide confidential and non-judgemental access to mental healthcare, to 1.5 billion people by 2030.”
Altopax
Altopax combines care with community by offering a virtual group therapy platform aimed at connecting mental healthcare providers with patients who need care.
Pharmaceutical and health investor Narmeen Azad created the platform to help others connect with a group of peers who are also experiencing the same mental health condition or chronic illness. Healthcare providers can also connect with other professionals to discuss personalised, integrated care.
Black mothers across most of England lack targeted maternal mental health support despite facing higher risks during and after pregnancy, a report has found.
The analysis found a patchwork of provision across England, with inconsistent data, funding and support for Black women.
The vast majority of Integrated Care Boards (ICBs) do not commission services specifically for Black maternal mental health, while five hold no information on such provision.
The findings come from Understanding local provision for Black maternal mental health, a briefing produced through the Black Maternal Mental Health project, led by The Motherhood Group in partnership with the Maternal Mental Health Alliance and Centre for Mental Health.
The briefing is based on Freedom of Information responses from 35 of England’s 36 ICBs.
Most ICBs rely on general perinatal mental health services, but gaps in available data mean it is impossible to determine whether these services meet the needs of Black mothers, the report found.
Black women face a higher risk of developing mental health problems during and after pregnancy but are less likely to receive the support they need, according to the briefing.
Mental health problems also remain a leading cause of maternal deaths.
The report found that many ICBs do not have a complete picture of activity in their areas, including training delivered by community organisations, making it difficult to hold the NHS to account.
Some ICBs are commissioning targeted services and working with community groups, showing that good practice exists.
The briefing calls on NHS England and the Department of Health and Social Care to establish clear national guidance on ICBs’ responsibility for commissioning, monitoring and evaluating culturally competent, trauma-informed services for Black mothers, coproduced with Black women and communities.
It also calls for routine, linked data collection on Black mothers’ perinatal mental health experiences and outcomes.
ICBs are also urged to invest sustainably in community-led services, work with organisations trusted by Black mothers and learn from existing good practice, including anti-racism and cultural competency training.
A £254m UK funding package will expand reproductive health access for millions of women and girls across 54 countries.
The government said the investment will support family planning for more than 15 million women each year and could prevent 14 million unintended pregnancies and more than 35,000 maternal deaths by 2028.
The funding will expand access to contraceptives and safe abortion products, as well as medicines and equipment for maternal and newborn healthcare.
Women will be supported to access family planning products including condoms, pills, implants and coils.
The programme will also provide equipment to improve early detection of post-partum haemorrhage, severe bleeding after childbirth, and treatments shown to reduce severe bleeding by almost two thirds.
Kirsty McNeill, minister for development, said: “It is a scandal that women and girls are denied the fundamental right to make informed choices about their own body, free from coercion, discrimination and violence.
“Every woman and girl should be able to make decisions about her own future. That choice can mean staying in school, finding work or surviving childbirth.
“The funding I have announced will help give millions more women and girls across the world autonomy over their bodies, control over their futures, and the chance to fulfil their full potential.”
The funding will be delivered through the CHOICES programme, working with the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) and Clinton Health Access Initiative (CHAI) across more than 50 of the world’s poorest countries, including conflict zones.
An estimated 259 million women who want to avoid or delay pregnancy are not using safe, modern contraceptive methods.
The government said it will also work with national governments to support sustainable health systems as countries transition away from donor funding.
Maternal deaths have fallen by 40 per cent since 2000, but progress has been uneven, with 70 per cent occurring in sub-Saharan Africa.
CHOICES operates in more than 50 countries, including Afghanistan, Chad, the Gambia, Malawi, Sudan and Yemen. It focuses on countries with the highest rates of death in childbirth and lowest rates of contraceptive use, as well as providing emergency support during humanitarian crises.
A health trust will decide how far back to review breast cancer cases after more than 30 women were found to have undergone unnecessary surgery.
It has already been established that hundreds of patients came to harm during treatment at the breast unit at County Durham and Darlington Foundation Trust (CDDFT).
The trust has apologised and is using specialists from other hospitals to review cases to see if other women underwent unnecessary operations or received otherwise poor care.
An extraordinary trust board meeting in Durham will consider the scope of its Look Back Exercise.
Board papers recommend reviewing cases as far back as 2015, working backwards one year at a time.
Documents estimate that this could take five years and involve reviewing the care of approximately 4,500 patients.
Members of the Pink Justice Network, an online support group for women who have received breast cancer treatment from the trust, will attend the meeting.
Nadeen Lister, who runs the group of around 150 women with Amelia Green, said members were calling for a public inquiry into what went wrong.
Lister told the Press Association: “When we started the group, nobody was talking about compensation, they just wanted justice for what has been done.
“The Look Back Exercise has cost the trust more than £500,000 this year, with staff checking back over records, medical experts reviewing cases and psychological help offered to patients affected.”
Green said the trust could avoid the expense of the exercise “by backing our call for a public inquiry”.
Hayley Collinson, of Hudgell Solicitors, which represents many affected patients, said: “Given the scale of harm revealed so far, we can’t see how the Trust board can come to any other decision than to extend this lookback investigation given the findings of the first batch of cases to have been reviewed, and the high percentage of harm being identified.
“The reality is that any woman who had breast cancer treatment at this Trust from 2015 onwards is now going to be questioning whether their treatment was appropriate and if they were actually harmed.”
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