Today is World Mental Health Day. To commemorate awareness, Silja Litvin, clinical psychologist and CEO of startup PsycApps, joined Cheddar News to discuss what her company is doing to improve mental health for teens and young adults. 

Today is World Mental Health Day. To commemorate awareness, Silja Litvin, clinical psychologist and CEO of startup PsycApps, joined Cheddar News to discuss what her company is doing to improve mental health for teens and young adults through a new "gamified" app.

UK-based PsycApps Developing "Gamified" Mental Health App for Young Adults

psych apps, which develops the mental health game for teens and young adults called EQ, raising the equivalent of 1.65 million in a seed round led by Morningside Ventures based in the U. K. And the company's psychopath says it's game EQ can provide students with tools that can help with mental health concerns like anxiety and depression. So on this world mental health day raising awareness for the topic and tools to help is more important than ever. And joining me now is ilia lip in founder and ceo psychopaths Azalea, thanks so much for coming on the show. So talk to me more about what your company's mental health platform and Game is offering to young people. Hi Kristen, thank you so much for having me. Um So I guess the problem with mental health and mental health offerings at the moment is that a lot of the products are for people who are already in need of mental health interventions. So they're already plus clinical threshold for depression or anxiety and they're often on wait list. That can be anywhere between three and six months. So what I'm concentrating on, if you look at the mental health as a spectrum, are the people who are either vulnerable and right now during Covid or the end of Covid who isn't in a vulnerable popular position or that are experiencing early symptoms of depression and society leading to then the threshold and we try to kind of solve one of the biggest problems in the mental health space which is not just mental health care and access to it, but also keeping people engage with the product long enough to reap any benefits. The american Psychology Association says that people spend on average two minutes on any kind of mental health app and then they disengage and that ends adds another threshold for people because then they say okay I can't afford to have a private consultant, I can't be on a wait list for two years and now digital mental health is not for me. So this is where we come in, we say okay we are evidence based. So we've gone through clinical trials, we do what we say, we actually build resilience significantly. So the probability that you'll get a mental health issue down the road is much much lower and we treat early onset depression and anxiety for a younger population while making the product interesting enough that that they actually stick to it long enough to have any kind of clinical effect. So let's talk about something fun here, you kind of gamified, it sounds like, which I think is very popular these days, keeps people hooked, makes it a fun experience, right? Because that's important to having fun. How does the game work? So you come into the game you build your avatar, you're introduced to the lore of the story which kind of like reflects positive psychology and then you go on adventures where before each level you learn a psychological skill that is connected to resilience building, lowering depression, learning anxiety but also interpersonal relationship skills and personal growth skills. Once you've learned that skills, you go on an interactive, choose your own adventure story, where you have to implement those skills to be able to level up collect gems and go through the storyline and it's engaging because you're into the story, you're playing yourself, you're going on adventures and um you have to use the psychological skills that you've learned, but it's in a low cost environment, so you won't get fired, your partner won't leave you, You know, you're not gonna lose friends, you're just gonna maybe have to go back and do that level again. I love that. Um okay, so, my next question I guess is we talked about it's kind of more like preventative health, right? Instead of necessarily fixing the problem after the fact, and we know how important preventative health is. So starting with kids this age, is there some sort of science or research that would show this particular age group is a really good age group to start some of these emotional mental health training sessions? Yes, so I specifically focused on a younger audience and we're talking 16-25, on average, 28 can be a bit older. I mean, we have a 72 year old player, but that's not our focus group because you are if you are to develop anxiety in the profession, the probability that you will experience the first symptoms are during that age and you're going to have the first large life changes during this phase. You're gonna have your first job, you're gonna leave home to go to university or do your education. You're gonna have your first proper relationship maybe have kids for the first time, fill out your first tax form and if you don't need proper mental health for that I don't know what what you need it for. So it's a very important phase in people's lives and if they develop mental illness and have for example drop off their university or whatever of course they were doing in their education is gonna have a huge economic and social impact for the rest of their lives. So I want to keep them resilience and strong. Okay resiliency. Very good thing. I like I like that word. There is Ilya, my last question. It's kind of a two parter. You just raise some money congrats, how are you gonna use that money and is it free to use right now or what's the cost to the consumer? So yes with the with the money we want to do two things. We want to make sure that we are out there in the market that schools universities, universities, colleges, they know that we exist and that we're a tool that is specifically made for their target for their population. Um And the second part of your question is this is not free but we want the education institutions to take over the payment of that. So we are selling to secondary schools colleges and universities here in the U. K. And we will be moving to the US very very soon. Um and we want the students to be able to have free access to that. And if people are at any kind of corporation and they want to have access to a. Q. Two they can write us and then we write their H. R. You know department and say your people would like to have free access to this tool. Would you like to purchase it for them because we don't want them to carry the cost of their mental health care in that Zillaya. I love what you're doing. Thank you so much for coming on especially today to celebrate and to talk about some solutions that Celia Lipton, founder and ceo of psychopaths.