Category: Flourish Labs

Categories
Flourish Labs

Why I Believe in Peer Support

I’m a doctor. A doctor’s toolbox includes lots of things: medical education and training, license to diagnose, and ability to recognize ailments and prescribe treatment. So when a colleague suggested that unlicensed folks with lived experience might be as good or even better at meeting the needs of people who are struggling with their mental health, you might think that I’d be skeptical. What tools would untrained individuals have in their toolboxes? 

To be sure, there is a crucial need for more mental health care support in our country. Today 157 million Americans (48%) live in areas with a shortage of mental health providers. Limited provider capacity means that over half of the 58 million adults with mental illness receive no mental health care at all. That’s more than 29 million! The average wait time to see any mental health provider is 1-3 months, and up to 6 or even 12 months in some places. And for historically underserved communities including BIPOC and LGBTQ+ populations, finding a culturally sensitive provider can be even more challenging. 

I have always told my patients that they need to build a village of support around them.  And as a physician, I know I need a team around me to take care of patients. As I looked at the literature on peer support, I realized that the model of connecting folks who have lived through the same struggles has been effectively helping people for decades outside of clinical settings. Communities for people who are mutually struggling with grief and addiction, for example, are trusted and commonplace.

No one can better understand what it is like to lose a loved one or to hit rock bottom than someone who has been there too.

It’s why groups of people continue to gather week after week, year after year, in church basements and rec centers, to support each other in ways that friends or doctors never could. It’s why people living with mental illness connect online to support and empower each other. 

Lived experience is a tool that only a peer has in their toolbox—and it can be as valuable as a doctor’s handbook or prescription when it comes to mental health.

What kinds of mental health outcomes could be unlocked if peer support was available at scale for folks living with other types of mental health struggles, such as eating disorders, depression, or anxiety?

Peer support is powerful. It’s an evidence-based practice that has been shown to significantly improve mental health outcomes, especially among college-age students and individuals from historically underserved communities, including Black, Transgender, and first-generation college students. Research compiled by Mental Health America shows peer support leads to:

  • Increased hopefulness and sense of well-being
  • Increased activation
  • Increased ongoing engagement with care
  • Improved self-care
  • Increased social functioning
  • Decreased substance use and depression
  • Decreased hospitalization, use of in-patient services, and costs to the mental health system  

Peer support is the gift of sharing life experiences with someone who is living or has lived your same truth.

Peers model wellness, personal responsibility, self-advocacy and hopefulness by sharing their stories and embodying recovery. 

Realizing the value of peer support put me on the path to co-founding Flourish Labs and creating peers.net, where we hire people with experience of mental health challenges and train them to become certified peer supporters. They are then matched with peers to deliver virtual peer support on our telehealth platform. Peers are not therapists or doctors, nor are they “regular people” who can simply “relate.” They are skilled allies who know how to give the support that helped them get to where they are, or that they wish they could have had when they were in the thick of it.  Isn’t that a tool everyone deserves to have in their mental health toolbox? 

Categories
Flourish Labs Product updates

Introducing peers.net, a new mental health support network for college students

I was going to start this post with the data. Over 50 millions Americans have a mental health diagnosis. Over half of them get no care at all. Only 30% get therapy.  Because they can’t afford it, because their insurance doesn’t cover it, because of stigma, because they live in a county without a single psychologist (that’s 75% of Americans), because the demand for therapy is growing faster than we can train therapists, because waitlists are getting longer. Suicide is the second cause of death among teenagers and young adults. 60% of college students have mental health challenges. 60% of LGBTQ+ youth who wanted mental health care in the past year were not able to get it. There is no doubt that we are in the midst of a mental health crisis, especially among young people.

Sources: SAMHSA National Survey, Bureau of Labor

I was then going to talk about how we need new solutions, like digital therapeutics and new drugs. That we need to train more people in mental health care, not just experts with Master and PhD degrees. That peer support – people with lived experience of mental health challenges supporting others in their community – is an overlooked solution to the mental health crisis. All of this is true, but it felt like yet another article about mental health, indistinguishable from all the others I’ve been reading.

As I was sitting on the sofa chewing my pencil, my husband looked at me and said, “You’re overthinking this. You need to write it from the heart. What do you want to say?”

What I really want to say is this: You are not alone

Behind all those statistics are real people, like my husband who has been living with bipolar since we first met at university. People who can’t see a way out of their suffering, who blame themselves, who worry their loved ones, who are feeling alone in their pain. Our families and friends, mine and yours.

If you are suffering, I want you to know: You are not alone. Your pain is real, and there are others who have been in that dark cave and have found their way out of it and sometimes, back into it again. People who’ve learned what it takes to pull themselves out of that cave and ask for help. 

We want to make it easier for you to share your pain and your story with others who’ve been there. To let them help carry your load because it’s too much for you to carry right now. You deserve this help. 

Our peer supporters will support you, one human being to another. They are uniquely qualified to do this because they’ve dealt with mental health challenges themselves, and are in recovery. Our peer supporters bring a variety of life experiences, from struggling with depression or body image to identifying as pansexual or Latinx. They will share their stories of growth and resilience. They won’t judge you and they’re not trying to change you, because they know that you are complete just as you are. Rather, they’re here to listen and to guide you through things that you may not feel equipped to deal with on your own. They will help you find strengths that you didn’t know you have.

Our website and our service certainly aren’t perfect; they’re what tech people call a ‘beta product’. We embrace the imperfections, because we know they will get better as we get feedback from our first users. We’ve built them with care: Our telehealth platform is HIPAA compliant and secure. Our peer supporters are trained to a  state certification level. Our head of peer support, Ally, met with every single supporter last week to see if they’re ready, and to provide them the support they may need.

Find your supporters

https://peers.net/supporters

If you would like to talk to a caring human being about something that’s going on in your life, we have wonderful peer supporters on our peers.net platform who are eager to be there for you. Not only have they gone through training and earned their certification, but they’ve also chosen to show up every day and be vulnerable to help you. 

When we asked them why they wanted to become peer supporters, here is what they said:

“I want to be the person I needed when I was younger.” 

“If it weren’t for the few people who were able to meet me where I was at mentally in my early twenties, I likely never would have healed. I can only hope to give that back to somebody who needs it in the same way.”

“I’m here because you matter. I know what it’s like to feel as if you’re drowning in your suffering and struggles with no room to breathe. I believe in you and your ability to heal and grow and love. You don’t have to do it alone.”

Some are just as nervous as you are right now. One said in our group chat, “I’m worried that nobody is going to book a session with me”. The others rallied around, reassuring her and making her feel heard – giving each other peer support!

So what are you waiting for? 

We hope you’ll join us in this journey. peers.net is now available for 18-30 year olds. Give peers.net a try and see how it feels to talk to someone who gets you.

It might not look like much now, but it’s the beginning of a revolution.

Categories
Flourish Labs

We’re hiring!

You’ve all seen those posts on your LinkedIn and Twitter feed where a startup announces their round and investors, and everyone comments on how excited they are about working together. I never understood the point of those announcements; they felt so self-congratulatory. Surely the real news is about the products we build and the users we serve, not merely that we raised some money. And then someone explained to me what those announcements are really about: letting prospective team members know that we are hiring… Well, we’re hiring!

Here’s why you should join us

Kim Newell Green (paediatrician, former Chief Innovation Officer at Kaiser Permanente) and I (product, marketing & moonshots at Google, X and ecommerce startups) started Flourish Labs with a vision of flourishing minds for all: a future where everyone can be their best self and achieve their potential. We’re on a mission to bring accessible, affordable mental health support to everyone who needs it by empowering people to support each other, starting with college students. We do this by mobilizing and scaling peer support with tech. We believe that peer support is an effective, yet underutilized solution to the mental health crisis. 

Peer supporters use their own lived experience of mental health challenges to help others. We are growing the peer supporter workforce by training college students in peer support skills, such as active listening, building rapport, strengths, self-care, coping strategies and safety. We’ll offer jobs in our peer support network, launching later this year. Students who seek support will be able to find Certified Peer Supporters in our network who match their needs, and book support sessions via our digital platform.

Our founding team includes Hannah Schilpp, Head of Operations (previously ran ops at 3 early stage healthcare startups, peer support experience); Shreya Singhvi, Chief of Staff (one of our former interns, recent Berkeley neurobiology & psychology graduate); Yu-Chi Kuo, Founding Engineer (previously Google, DeepMind & Facebook). We also have two awesome interns, Anastasia Zorlas (Northeastern Business major doing a Coop placement with us) and Nathan Blanken (U Maryland CS major & Active Minds chapter lead – see Nathan’s blogpost about his summer internship).

This work takes a village, so we’re grateful to our partners and advisors who bring their peer support, lived experience, clinical, digital health and learning design expertise. We’re excited to be working with Alison Malmon, Becky Fein and Laura Horne at Active Minds, Jammie Gardner, Tia Barnes and Martin Rafferty at Youth Era, Betheny Gross and Jason Levin at WGU Labs, Joanna Strober at Midi Health, Kali Cyrus at Johns Hopkins, Kelly Davis at Mental Health America, Linsey Morrison at Eventbrite, Manpreet Singh at Stanford University, Sam McLean at University of North Carolina, and Shuranjeet Singh at Taraki. 

We recently closed our seed round led by Gradient Ventures and Collaborative Fund, with participation from Learn Capital, WGU Labs, Tiny VC and wonderful angels. Thank you all for backing us!

We’re looking for a diverse bunch of company builders, peer supporters, product and marketing folks

Please check out our career page at https://flourishlabs.com/careers/ to see open roles, why and how we care deeply about diversity, equity and inclusion, and the wonderful benefits we offer (Kim and I worked at Kaiser and Google before we set up Flourish Labs and appreciate good health insurance!)

We are currently hiring for the following roles: Founding Product Manager; Founding Marketing Manager; Product Designer (freelance/contract to perm opportunity); Peer Support Supervisor (licensed or unlicensed), Certified Peer Supporter, Peer Support Apprentice.

If none of those roles are a fit but you love our mission, we’d still love to hear from you. Just fill in our application form and select ‘Anything Role’ when we ask you what role you are interested in.

Categories
Flourish Labs Product updates

My summer internship at Flourish Labs: Designing a new feature and gaining real-world experiences that count

About this time last year, Flourish Labs released an early beta version of myala, an app that helps you keep track of the ups and downs of your mind. I was introduced to myala by Active Minds. At the time, Flourish Labs didn’t yet have an official intern program, but I started to work informally with Obi to gather user feedback from other students, and iterated to make the app better. In the beginning, we focused on how to improve the reports because they fell short of user expectations of what the app should do for them. We made it easier for users to see how their different factors change over time by presenting Check-in data in a line chart, and added a detailed sleep report for those who have connected their wearables. You can read more about this in my blog post here. This summer, I joined Flourish Labs full time as a product intern and got to design a new app feature from scratch.

How we designed our new notes tag feature

One of the features in the app is the ability to take a note, either at the end of a Check-in or at any time by tapping on ‘Add a note’ on the homescreen. When we analyzed the engagement data, we found that the average note written by a user was about 14 words long, and about one in three users submitted a note with each check-in they completed. It was important to us that users can easily add a note about how they are feeling and that they do not feel like it is a burden to add in some more information after completing a Check-in. To make it even easier to take a note, we decided to develop a feature that allowed users to submit a note about how they are feeling without needing to type in the free-hand text box. 

To start with, I wrote a Product Requirement Document (PRD) for the notes feature. The purpose of the PRD was to clarify the goals for the feature, provide input for our designer for the visual design, and help focus our engineers on solving the right problem. Writing a PRD was a lot tougher than writing an essay for school because of how detailed each section has to be. The good news is that it is a living document, so with feedback from others on the team and a lot of revisions, it started to come together. You can see my final version here. After figuring out the outline for the feature, it was time to do some user research. We had four college interns at Flourish Labs this summer, so I was able to tap into their collective minds and work closely with them to further spec out the details. We also got input from our scientific advisors at Stanford and mental health measurement experts at the University of Leiden in the Netherlands. 

Next, I sent the PRD over to our designer Charles who was able to actualize our ideas. His designs prompted discussions about how many mood tags there should be, the order they should be in, and how they should be arranged on the page. After we agreed on the design, I presented our ideas to the engineering team. A few weeks later, the first version of the feature got released on our internal build and it was so gratifying to see it live. After fixing some bugs and making further improvements, the feature was released to the public! I’m looking forward to getting feedback from our users!

Move the slider to see how much faster we’ve made adding notes. Now, users can also tap on hashtags that best describe their current mood.

New in Check-ins: Measuring Flourishing

During my internship I also worked on a new Check-in feature, a flourishing survey. We’ve always had daily Check-ins to help you track your mood and other factors such as your motivation, sleep, mental focus and social interactions and see how they fluctuate on a daily basis. Our advisor, Stanford professor Dr. Manpreet Singh, suggested that we should also measure more directly whether someone is flourishing or not – after all, that’s our company name! Dr. Singh and one of her students, Cody Abbey, did a review of the flourishing literature and recommended that we use a measurement approach developed by the Human Flourishing Program at Harvard University. We now offer a survey once a month where users can answer questions such as “I feel the things I do in my life are worthwhile.” and “I am satisfied with life as a whole these days.” which get summarized into a Flourishing factor.

Once a month, we offer a Flourishing survey.
This new factor is shown in Check-in reports. It only shows up in the Year view since the questions are monthly, not daily.

Real-world experiences that count

Looking back on the past few months at Flourish Labs, I witnessed how the work I did truly had an impact on our product.  Over this past summer, I learned how to design product features, develop websites using no-code tools, and work collaboratively with a variety of cross-functional teams. The start-up experience is unique – I learned things at Flourish Labs that I would not have learned in the classroom, and the skills I learned have equipped me to handle whatever may come next in my career. This summer allowed me to see how hard work turned into a real change in our app, and what I hope is a better experience for our users.

The summer flew by, and I am now back on campus taking computer science classes and leading our Active Minds chapter. September is Suicide Awareness Month, and we just hosted Active Minds’ “Send Silence Packing” exhibit at College Park. Send Silence Packing includes personal stories from individuals who are personally touched by suicide. The stories are a compelling way to raise awareness, and end the silence and stigma surrounding suicide. Hosting it on our campus was a powerful experience for me personally, and a reminder of how important the work of Active Minds and Flourish Labs is.

If you’re interested in an internship or job with Flourish Labs, take a look at our career page at https://flourishlabs.com/careers/

Note: This blogpost was updated on 7 April 2023 to reflect the name change from håp to myala.

Categories
Flourish Labs Peer Support Training

Peer Support 101: Empowering college students to support each other with free mental health training

Why we’re launching our peer support training and network

At Flourish Labs, we’re on a mission to bring accessible, affordable mental health support to everyone who needs it by empowering people to support each other. We’re in the midst of a student mental health crisis. Over 40% of college students have mental health challenges, according to the Healthy Minds Study. College counseling centers are struggling to keep up with demand. 

We believe that peer support is an effective, yet under-utilized solution to this crisis. Peer supporters use their own lived experience of mental health challenges to help others. Studies have shown that peer support not only benefits the student being supported, but also helps the supporter maintain good mental health. In other words, it’s mutual. A recent survey found that 20% of students already have experienced peer support, and another 50% want to try it. On many campuses, students are self-organizing to provide informal peer support to each other, with little or no training.

Unfortunately, as with other mental health professions, there aren’t enough trained and qualified peer supporters to meet the need. Mental Health America estimates that only about 24,000 people work as Certified Peer Support Specialists in the US today. 

Our ambition is to grow this workforce by training students in peer support skills, such as active listening, building rapport, strengths, self-care, coping strategies and safety. We’ll then offer students a part-time job as Certified Peer Supporters in our peer support network launching later this fall. Students who want support will be able to find Certified Peer Supporters who match their needs, and book support sessions via our digital platform.

We’re not alone

This effort will take a village, not just a technology startup such as Flourish Labs, so we’re partnering with nonprofits and colleges to bring the peer supporter training and job opportunity to students. We’re working closely with two leading nonprofits in the youth peer space. Youth Era, a peer-led organization based in Oregon who have deep experience in training youth peer supporters, is our training partner. We’ve been designing our program with Active Minds, the largest nationwide network of student mental health volunteers with chapters on over 600 college campuses.

We’re also working with student groups, career centers, psychology departments and innovation groups at Northeastern University, University of St Thomas Houston, Western Governors University, Arizona State University and University of Oregon to bring this opportunity to their community. (Read this blogpost on why WGU chose to partner with us.) We’re always looking for more college partners, especially community colleges and others with diverse student populations. So if you are interested in offering peer supporter training, paid work experience and meaningful part-time jobs to your students, please get in touch.

Sign up for ‘Peer Support 101’ training, starting August 29th

Our ‘Peer Support 101’ training is a 20-hour live, virtual course designed and delivered in partnership with Youth Era. It is based on Youth Era’s proven Uplift program, and adapted for college students.  

You can learn more about the training and sign up here: https://flourishlabs.com/peersupportertraining/

Register by August 25th to join the training starting August 29th, or get priority access for future courses if you can’t make this one.

We are offering 150 scholarships so students can participate in the training free of charge (worth $475 each). If you complete the course and pass the assessment at the end, you will receive a digital certificate that you can display on your LinkedIn or Handshake profile – and a $75 gift voucher!

As with all our projects, we’re designing our training with students, for students. This first cohort will be a beta test and we’ll evolve it over time.

We hope to see you at our first training!

Image: Nathan Blanken and fellow University of Maryland students at Active Minds event in October 2021. Photo by Kevin Carney

Categories
Flourish Labs Product updates

The myala signal: An easier way to reach out and get support from your friends when you need it

Posted on 16 June 2022, updated 7 April 2023
by Anastasia Zorlas, Product & UX Research Intern

My personal journey with mental health started in my senior year of high school. When I first experienced my mental wellness declining, I became very isolated from my support system – to the point where I kept all of my emotions inside and made sure that everyone I cared about stayed out. At the time, I was scared to bring up how poor my mental state was because I didn’t want anyone to worry about me. When I started college, I was lucky to meet people who understood what I was going through and helped me to find the right support. 

Now I’m a fourth-year entrepreneurship and computer science student at Northeastern University. In January I moved to San Francisco for a semester to learn more about startups. I met Obi Felten, who had left Google X to start her company Flourish Labs, focusing on the student mental health crisis.  I was drawn to Obi’s vision of ‘flourishing minds for all’ and her willingness to ask for help from students and people with lived experience of mental health challenges to ensure that the products Flourish Labs makes are what we need and want. I joined her as an intern, excited about the opportunity to make change for students who are struggling with their mental health and might not be as lucky as I’ve been in finding support.

There have been significant strides in the past few years to reduce the social stigma of seeking help if you experience mental health challenges. Yet there are still so many people who are not getting the support they need, when they need it.

Over the past few months, we have been working with groups of students from Northeastern University and our partner Active Minds to evolve the myala app. myala started out last September as a self-tracking app, helping you understand the ups and downs of your mind. It also offered quick access to crisis counsellors from Crisis Text Line. 

But sometimes you’re not in crisis, you just want someone to talk to. I know from personal experience how hard it can be to reach out to a friend or family member for help when I’m feeling low. Who do I contact? What do I say to them?

In one of our design workshops with Northeastern students in the Bay Area, we discussed how difficult it can be to reach out for help exactly when you need it most.

We brainstormed ways to break down this barrier, and got inspired by the bat-signal beckoning Batman for help!

The first bat-signal
Image credit: DC Comics

What if you could summon help from your friends with the tap of a button?

Today we’re launching the myala signal, which makes it easier to reach out and get support from your friends when you need it. Here is how it works:

  1. In the support section of the myala app, you can invite your friends or family to be part of your support team. After they accept, they appear in your support team list. You can add or remove supporters at any time.
  2. You can customize the text message that myala sends out to your friends when you ask for support. 
  3. When you want support, all you need to do is tap the myala signal button in the app. myala sends a text message to each person on your support team with your message, asking them to get in touch with you. 

Next time you are feeling down and want someone to talk to, send out a myala signal! 

The myala signal is not intended to replace crisis support. If you’re in a crisis and want an immediate response, please contact 988.

How we designed the myala signal with students, for students

In my internship, I learnt a lot about the process from idea to product feature launching in the app. Here is how we did it:

Co-designing with Northeastern students

1. In our design workshop, we brainstormed how a bat-signal might manifest in the håp app.

Bat signal brainstorm

2. We created a storyboard of the user experience.

Bat signal storyboard

3. We drew flow diagrams and a paper prototype with screen wireframes made of giant Post-It notes.

Paper flow & wireframes

4. After the workshop, I worked with Nathan to transfer our paper designs into flows and wireframes in Figma, our user interface design tool. We discussed the flows and wireframes with our designer and our engineering team, and made some adjustments.

Figma flows & wireframes

4. Our designer Charles turned our wireframes into screen designs for our engineering team to implement.

5. After our engineers built the feature, we tested an internal build with a small group of testers to make sure it worked properly.

Today we’re releasing the app with the new myala signal feature to the public, and we can’t wait to get your feedback!

myala is now freely available to all students

myala was launched last September in a closed beta test with a few hundred trusted testers, mostly Active Minds members and Northeastern students. We are hugely grateful to our testers who gave us plenty of feedback on how to improve and evolve the app. 

Starting today, we are making the myala app freely available to any student over the age of 16 studying in the US. You just need an email address ending in .edu to sign into the app. As a myala user, you can invite friends and family to use myala with your personal referral link, even if they are not a student. Go to settings/refer a friend to share the app.

myala is still very much a work in progress. We welcome your feedback as we continue to design with students, for students. You can give feedback at any time by tapping the feedback button in the top right corner of the app, it looks like a speech bubble.

If you want to get more actively involved, we’ll be running more focus groups, online surveys and design workshops in the summer and fall. I’m staying on at Flourish Labs to do a coop placement for the rest of the year working on user experience research and product development, so look out for an invite from me to participate!

Coming soon: Peer supporter training in partnership with Youth Era

Starting this summer, Flourish Labs is partnering with Youth Era to offer peer support training for students. Youth Era is a nonprofit based in Eugene, Oregon who have been empowering teenagers and young adults with peer support for over a decade. Flourish Labs will be offering students the opportunity to work as a peer supporter during their studies after they successfully complete the training. We’re excited to bring peer support to more college students across the US.

Learn more at https://myala.app or download myala from the App Store or Google Play. 

If you already use myala, the app will prompt you to update to the new version of the app with the myala signal. To manually update, go to the App Store or Google Play and tap ‘update’.

Learn more about peer supporter training and sign up at https://peers.net/give-support

Note: This blogpost was updated on 7 April 2023 to reflect the name change from håp to myala.

#mentalhealth #studentmentalhealth #livedexperience #peersupport #usercentereddesign #BuildInTheOpen

Categories
Flourish Labs Product updates

Designing with students, for students: A new release of the myala app, informed by your feedback

Posted on 21 February 2022, updated 7 April 2023
by Nathan Blanken, Product & UX Intern 

I am a sophomore computer science major at the University of Maryland, College Park. I am also the President of the Active Minds chapter at UMD. I have been working as an intern with the Flourish Labs team over the past few months to help improve myala and give my perspective as a student.

Last September we launched the first version of myala to a small group of trusted testers. We knew the app wasn’t perfect, but we wanted to get it in the hands of students sooner rather than later to get real feedback from real users. Since then we have received hundreds of bug reports and feature suggestions through the feedback form in the app. We also ran focus groups and online surveys in November and December. We got a lot of feedback, both positive and constructive, and were able to incorporate many of the suggestions into this new release.

Check-ins are our most popular feature, and working well

A myala Check-in consists of about a dozen questions on different factors that affect your mental wellbeing and health such as your mood, calmness, focus, motivation, socialization and how you feel about your sleep. Think of a myala ‘Check-in’ as a twice daily activity, just like brushing your teeth. It only takes about a minute. 

Check-ins have been by far the most popular feature within myala, with over 3,600 completed. Check-ins got mostly positive ratings and comments in our user research.

“I like that it keeps track of how I am doing so I don’t necessarily need to go out of my way to journal about it. I don’t always have a ton of free time so this is nice because it is quick and easy.” 

“I like that it helps me to check in with myself and see how I am feeling. I like that I can see Check-ins from the past.”

“Sometimes Check-ins accidentally fall out of my routine.”

“How much has your thinking slowed? can be interpreted positively or negatively, which is not necessarily helpful to people who are looking at the question from a more objective lens. How should this question be interpreted? Is it good to have slower or faster thinking?”

We’ve been iterating the Check-in user experience to make improvements such as randomizing the order that the questions are presented, where the slider starts, and how responses are stored so you can complete a Check-in even if you don’t have an internet connection. 

We are still figuring out how to help you make Check-ins a daily habit. You can customize the reminder time for morning and evening in Your Settings/Check-in reminders. Tap the wrench icon on the bottom right of the myala app to get to Your Settings. Some users haven’t been receiving notifications from myala to prompt them, which makes it easy to forget to do a Check-in. If you are not getting notifications, please check the permissions on your iPhone or Android phone.

We are also revisiting the wording of some of the questions, and will swap out some that are less useful or confusing in a future release.

Overall, it seems that Check-ins are working well for you. Becky Fein from Active Minds wrote a great article about how Check-ins have been useful for her.

myala now connects to Apple Watch

One of the unique features of myala is that it allows you to see data from your wearable device alongside the data you enter in Check-ins. Version 1 only supported Fitbit and Oura. Many users – myself included – wanted to connect Apple Watch, and I’m pleased to report that this latest release of myala integrates with Apple Watch. You can now see your sleep data from your Apple Watch directly in myala.

Some users were unaware that you can connect a wearable to myala, so we’re now including information about how to connect a wearable device in the welcome emails and the Help section.

The Your Data reports needed a complete redesign

Once you complete a Check-in, you are taken to the Your Data section of the app. You can also access this by tapping on the geometric symbol on the bottom nav of the app.

In V1, reports were split into “Mind Data” reports for the Check-in data and “Body Data” reports for data coming from wearables. They showed a simple zero to 10 score of each factor, with shading corresponding to the scores. There was a feature to compare two different factors such as mood and calm or sleep and motivation, but it was buried deep on the bottom of the reports and you couldn’t compare more than two.

The feedback we received about version 1 of the reports was blunt: They were not working. Users found the reports hard to read, and they didn’t provide enough insights. We tried displaying a summary on the top, but the algorithm wasn’t working well, so we took it out again for now.

“I really like the different colors that are being used. However, I do not know what each means. It is difficult to understand how to read the Mind Data reports.”

“I’m not sure what the numbers mean.”

“Add ability to customize the timespan that can be viewed for reports (day, week, month, year)”

“A line graph could be more beneficial in viewing decline in mood, sleep, focus, etc. patterns.”

We appreciate the constructive feedback and suggestions for improvement!

We went back to the drawing board and made some key design decisions based on the user feedback: to focus on trends over time, comparisons between factors, and enable you to see how your sleep impacts your day-to-day mental wellbeing.

New Check-in report: Trends and comparisons

We’re excited to show you the completely redesigned reports. If you click on the Your Data tab at the bottom of the myala app, you will first see a new Check-in report section. The data from your Check-ins is displayed in a line chart showing trends over time. If you complete at least one Check-in a day, you will get a continuous trend line. Sleep questions are only asked in the morning Check-in, so don’t miss that one!

By default, you will see the “Week” view which shows you your responses from the prior seven days. If you select “Month” or “Year”, you will see data from the past 28 days or last 12 months, respectively. On any of these you can swipe left to see previous time periods.

myala breaks down your Check-in report by 7 factors that relate to your mental health and wellbeing:

  • Mood – How up or down you feel.
  • Calmness – How calm or anxious you feel.
  • Focus – How clear-headed and focused you feel.
  • Motivation – How you feel about your ability to take initiative, how enthusiastic and satisfied you feel.
  • Sleep – How you feel about your sleep quality.
  • Socialization – How you see yourself around others and your social interactions.
  • Physical – How you feel your psychological state may be impacting your body and vice versa.

You can understand your data in more depth by comparing two or more factors. For example, you can compare how your mood is changing versus your sleep. Tap a factor button to toggle it on and off in the chart.

New Sleep report based on wearable data

The V1 “Body Data” report showed average scores for sleep quality, activity and heart rate, which users found not very useful or actionable.

In the redesign we chose to focus on sleep, which has a big impact on mental health. Sleep duration is difficult to self-assess accurately, so the wearable data is useful in addition to how you rate your sleep in your morning Check-in.

The new sleep report will only show data if you have connected a wearable. If you have an Apple Watch, Fitbit, or Oura ring, you can now connect it to myala. Tap the wrench icon on the bottom right of the app to go to Your Settings/Wearable devices. Once you connect your wearable, the last day of data will be automatically loaded into the sleep report so you can start to view different aspects of your sleep. 

In the top chart of the sleep report, myala shows you the average duration of sleep for the nights that you wore your wearable device. Similar to the check-in report, you can select week, month, or year and swipe left or right to change the dates shown.

Right below you will see a line chart showing the times you fell asleep and woke up as indicated by the sun and moon icons. A consistent bedtime helps to improve sleep, so this is an actionable insight.

The new sleep charts are really helpful for me because they allow me to easily compare how much sleep I get each night with the results from my Check-ins. Being able to see real sleep data from my wearable device and see how that impacted my day-to-day mood or calmness is really important to me.

New Notes report

In V1 of the app, you could make a diary note at the end of a Check-in, or any time by tapping on the ‘add a note’ link on the home screen. If you like to journal, you will probably agree with me when I say that this is super useful. It is hard to remember details about how I felt during the day if it was more than just a few days ago, so having it written in the notes is a good way to keep track of it.

However, V1 didn’t have a way to display the notes yet, and our users noticed!

“I want the function to keep track of my notes and diaries.”

We’ve fixed this in the new release.

At the bottom of the Your Data page is now one of my favorite parts of myala: the ability to view all of the notes you took. The notes section is particularly helpful because you can refer to these notes and then you can scroll up and find your Check-in or sleep report data to see how your results matched up with how you felt that day. It is so convenient that all of this is in the same place.

What’s next?

When we asked users how much they liked using the myala app, the overall feedback was positive.

“I think this app is off to a really good start. I really like the simplicity and intelligence that has been integrated into it.”

“I am enjoying the app so far and feel grateful for the opportunity to engage in the app’s development.”

But many of you weren’t sure yet if you would continue to use myala in the future, because it wasn’t useful enough yet.

“I haven’t figured out why it is useful to me.”

“I haven’t gotten enough analytics from the app to justify the use.”

We hope that the new reports are one step closer to making myala useful to you.

When we asked what would most likely make you continue to use myala in the future, the most requested feature was peer support. 

“I’m really excited about the peer support function.”

So that’s what we’re working on next!

We’re just getting started on the design of the peer support feature. If you would like to participate in one of our focus groups to brainstorm with us, you can sign up here.

I have seen first hand how the team at Flourish Labs is working incredibly hard to provide the best possible user experience, and quickly iterating to implement user feedback from the students using the app. 

Thanks again to everyone who provided feedback. We are so excited for you all to see this new version of myala and have it be a part of your daily routine to keep track of your mental wellbeing. We look forward to the next round of feedback, please keep it coming! Be sure to keep an eye out for future blog posts and releases as we strive to make myala better for you.

If you already use myala, go to the App Store or Google Play and tap ‘update’ to get the new version of the app.

Note: This blogpost was updated on 7 April 2023 to reflect the name change from håp to myala.

Categories
Flourish Labs

My next mission: Flourishing minds for all

Today is my last day at Alphabet, after 15 great years at Google and X. I’m setting up Flourish Labs, a startup combining cutting edge mental health science and technology to foster flourishing and good mental health. Our mission is flourishing minds for all. We are building a future where nobody is held back by mental health problems, where everyone can be their best self and achieve their potential.

Poor mental health is a huge problem for our society that has been exacerbated by recent events. The pandemic and social injustice especially affected young people and people of colour. The number of people reporting depression or anxiety symptoms in the US is now 31% of adults, 33% of Black adults, 35% of Latinx adults and 49% of 18-29 year olds, according to the CDC’s mental health survey in May 2021.

Flourishing minds for all college students

Flourish Lab’s first mission is focused on college students: no student left behind by mental health problems. Sadly that is not the case today.

40% of US college students – around 8 million – suffer from mental health problems (Healthy Minds Study). Over 40 percent of students with a mental health diagnosis drop out of college (National Academies report, 2019). Suicide is the number 2 cause of death among students, with 28,000 attempts a year (Healthy Minds study, CDC, Taub & Thompson, 2013). 

With students returning to college campuses this fall and 70% of college presidents stating that mental health is one of their top concerns (ACE survey), now is the time to make a difference for millions of students. Studies demonstrate that improving student mental health can increase academic performance and graduation rates (Healthy Minds/ACE report, 2019). Investing in student mental health makes good economic sense too: 30 students who stay in college for 2 more years at $20k/year tuition yield $1.2M in tuition revenues that would otherwise be lost, and their lifetime earnings increase by $3m (Eisenberg et al, 2009).

We are launching a pilot in August for the 2021/22 academic year. If you are a college that wants to improve the mental health of your students and are interested in taking part in our pilot, please get in touch. We are prioritising community colleges and HBCUs (Historically Black Colleges & Universities) for the initial launch.

We are looking for donors to help fund our non-profit partners, including Active Minds whose founder Alison Malmon has joined our advisory board. If you are a foundation, family office or individual excited about seed-funding innovation projects at the intersection of mental health, education/college success and diversity/equity/inclusion, I’d love to talk with you. All donations will go directly to colleges in our pilot and to our non-profit partners.

To learn more about Flourish Labs and get in touch, please visit flourishlabs.net.

Moving on from Google and X: Thank you and I love you

A few weeks ago I wrote about love being a competitive advantage. I’ve loved my time at Google and X because of the projects I worked on, but most of all because of the people I worked with. I’m grateful to my managers and mentors who propelled me, to my team members who taught me so much (especially the engineers who patiently explained complicated physics, chemistry and AI to me), to my peers who shared their journey with me.

I fell in love with Google at first sight in 1999, when an eToys engineer showed me a new search engine that actually worked. I fell in love again in 2005 when I sat in the lobby of the newly opened Google London office, watching bright-eyed Googlers bustling with a sense of urgency and purpose. They had lava lamps and colourful bouncy balls, just like eToys! I felt a sense of belonging instantly. My first interview was with Lorraine Twohill, a formidable Irish woman who ran the European marketing team at the time and is now the CMO of Google. After our conversation she said, “We’re going to hire you, you’ll be great at Google. Now you need to convince another 14 people that this is the case.” I thought she was joking, but that’s exactly what happened. 14 interviews later I found myself in her team as Google’s first consumer marketing lead in Europe.

I joined Google at a time of explosive growth. When I started, there were around 5000 Googlers globally and 150 in London. We hired people, launched new products and opened offices at breakneck speed. In the marketing team, I had brilliant mentors in Dan Cobley and Yonca Brunini Dervisoglu who fused creativity and data. I worked on inspiring projects: Teaming up with British Airways for a campaign featuring Google Earth. Rolling out Google Maps in dozens of countries across Europe, Middle East and Africa. Launching Android and Chrome, growing them to hundreds of millions of users. Learning how to make posters and TV ads to complement our online campaigns. Taking Streetview to the small German village of Oberstaufen. Turning the Google homepage into a canvas for children’s art with Doodle4Google. Creating April fool jokes that might someday become real products. As my 20% project, I founded Campus London, Google’s first space for entrepreneurs.

I loved marketing, and at the same time I missed building products and working with engineers. When Megan Smith, a mentor and great connector, introduced me to Astro Teller in 2012, I was curious. Astro worked at GoogleX which the New York Times had called “Google’s lab of wildest dreams”. He told me about self-driving cars and other, still secret projects: internet from balloons, delivery drones, a contact lens that measures glucose in your tears. I loved the audacity and potential for impact. I asked him practical questions: Is it legal to fly balloons over countries? Are you going to partner with mobile phone companies? Do you have a business plan for any of these projects? Astro raised his eyebrows and said, “Those are good questions, why don’t you come over and help us answer them.” 

Two months later my family and I moved to California for a new adventure. In my nine years at X, I kept my job title of “Head of getting moonshots ready for contact with the real world”, but I changed roles three times – a testament that people as well as projects can pivot at X.  

I started as one of the first non-engineers at X with an undefined role and broad remit to ‘de-risk everything that’s not tech’, including product, marketing, legal, policy, operations and business planning. I hired leaders for many of those functions, transforming X from a pure engineering team to the multidisciplinary team it is today. In my first year I mostly worked on Wing, a drone delivery service, and Loon, expanding internet access worldwide with balloons. When Loon took flight in New Zealand in the summer of 2013, I couldn’t travel to the launch site with the team because I was about to have a baby. I had a bet with the engineers about who would launch first. My daughter came 10 days early and Loon was 10 days late, so I won.

In my second chapter, I ran early stage projects. My team and I incubated projects like Mineral, Foghorn, Chronicle, Dandelion and Malta. Many didn’t pan out. I became an expert on how to deal with failure and how to kill good things to make room for great ones. I loved learning about everything from computational agriculture to carbon-neutral fuel chemistry, VR, cybersecurity and energy storage, but running a portfolio was not my highest and best use. I am more of a scuba diver than a snorkeler; I love going deep on one project rather than spreading myself thin over several.

In my third incarnation at X, I got the opportunity to go deep on a topic I was passionate about: mental health. I started Project Amber with a small multi-disciplinary team of neuroscientists, hardware and software engineers, machine learning researchers and med-tech experts. We explored how to use brain-based biomarkers and machine learning to better assess depression and anxiety. At the end of 2020, we open-sourced our EEG technology, published our ML methods and shared insights from our user research with clinicians and students. (See this blogpost for more detail and links to materials.)

My career has moved from strategy to product to marketing to leadership roles, from ecommerce to consumer tech to moonshots. Now I am bringing all these experiences to my next chapter, focusing on mental health. I can’t wait to see where this takes me. If I have learnt one thing in the past 25 years, I know that my path won’t be linear.