“There is a thin line between being mentally and emotionally well and mentally and emotionally unwell,” Jen Hyatt, founder and CEO of Big White Wall, a digital mental health and well-being service. Technology can help navigate that thin line, Hyatt explained Friday at the 12th annual Connected Health Symposium in Boston.
The line is so thin because of the scope of the problem, said Hyatt, who founded Big White Wall in the UK in 2007 and launched it stateside last year. According to Hyatt, one in four people on earth will struggle with mental health at some point in their lifetime. Yet, 50 percent of those who are mentally unwell do not get farther than their primary care physician, partially because of stigma, and 75 percent never get any help, Hyatt said.
Technology can provide three types of safety net, according to Hyatt.
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“The first is community,” she said. Users can discuss their issues with like-minded people, participate in therapy groups or even have one-on-one sessions with behavioral health professionals. To increase the feeling of being welcome, Big White Wall provides birthday reminders like a social network.
The second type of safety net is clinical, and Big White Wall has improved greatly in this realm.
In 2007, one social worker could manage 350 simultaneous logons, Hyatt said. Now, with the automation of clinical functions such as behavior assessments as well as with the development of better algorithms, one clinician can manage 1,500 people.
“They work from a dashboard,” Hyatt explained. Clinicians can intervene immediately, for example, if the system flags a post as being a sign of suicidal thoughts.
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Those two forms of safety net are related to the third. “Both are driven by the most powerful safety net of all, and that it data,” Hyatt said.
If someone contributes just 20 words, the system can predict scores for anxiety or depression with fairly high accuracy. This helps stratify risk and find the appropriate level of support and treatment, Hyatt explained.
“Data, for me, is the big hope of the future,” she said. “Let us not be afraid of technology.” It can help people walk the thin line.
