- Celebrate Grief Awareness Day on the 30th of August with MentalHappy.
- MentalHappy offers a unique emotional amusement park experience, providing affordable, expert-guided mental health support groups that create a diverse and thriving community.
- It addresses accessibility challenges in mental health services, offering a marketplace for licensed experts while being backed by funding from investors like Y Combinator.
Welcome to the emotional amusement park, where life's rollercoaster diverts through your emotional midlife crisis! Let’s take a moment to picture our emotions having a wild party, replete with confetti mood swings, and a dance floor for all the uncertainties that exist in our world.
Yes, indeed I am referring to the business that acts as a GPS for an emotional highway, guiding through its twists and turns. For me they are like these cool babysitters with empathy and coping mechanisms, and where feelings are like a group of rowdy kids on a sugar high.
So whether you're taking a spin on the "Am-I-Adulting-Right" Ferris wheel or stepping into the "Career Change" haunted house, these squads are here to make mental mayhem into an amusing, moving adventure. What if they end up convincing that, emotional baggage isn't too heavy for this whimsical ride of life?
History of MentalHappy
In today’s generation, there is help provided and accessible for individuals who are having mental health issues or are on the verge of losing their sanity. But, there are so many issues or difficulties in accessing itself, for example, cost. But what if someone who is aware and has gone through this issue, is offering help?
“I’ve been on both sides of the spectrum where I can afford the $175 an hour for therapy, and where I couldn’t afford it. We all need help navigating the life events that we go through, but how do we do that with an expert, not pay a fortune for it, be accessible, and do that collectively with other people in a positive way?” - Founder and CEO of MentalHappy - Tamar Blue.
This also says a lot about the company as well. It all started in high school when she founded a peer support group that offered social support to students who were being bullied. Tamar is aware of the difficulties people face in locating the assistance they require to deal with emotionally challenging life events, such as prohibitive expenses and practical limitations.
Her drive to contribute to the solution has driven her work and activism for the past 20 years. Hence the whole idea of “providing people of all races, genders, and economic statuses with a safe and secure platform to discuss their emotional health and daily challenges.” makes sense.
How to take part in it?
You must be wondering what is the process of accessing MentalHappy Resources. It’s as simple as signing up for our Newzchain Letter. You sign on to their portal and fill up the answers to 7 questions that would help the website in navigating and suggesting emotional/ mental health support groups. There is also an opportunity to join webinars and sessions where prominent doctors, psychiatrists, mental health experts, and so on are there for specific topics to cover.
Honestly, when I got to know about this, I immediately signed up for their upcoming webinar which was free of cost. That brings me to their next aspect and our main criteria - price.
Budget-friendly
Being a college student, I obviously don’t have 175$ for one single therapy session but I surely can manage 10$ a month. While I was exploring different groups, I found a few free-of-cost groups that could be joined but other than that there are a couple of private and issue-specific groups starting from 10$ a month to 50$ a month or maybe even more. I mean obviously, not everything could ever be free in this world, but hey at least there is something that someone built up for us, right?
The good news doesn't end here yet. If you’re in this field or profession. MentalHappy is also an opportunity to grab what is knocking on your door. According to TechCrunch, it also provides a source of income for licensed health and wellness experts; the company takes 5% of its monthly app earnings. The pros decide how much it costs to join their groups.
However, content moderation could be difficult for bigger organizations. Although MentalHappy includes automatic tools that can spot bullying or trigger words, group leaders are supposed to control their own group. According to Blue, group managers will occasionally hire an assistant or associate therapist to assist them.
This definitely confirms that “MentalHappy is a marketplace.” as Blue mentioned.
Hidden Gems
But wait, Blue isn’t the only pillar of this company. Their core of medical professionals are the ones who have actually helped in building up this community which is now transformed into groups.
Not just that, their financial credentials and majorly the part where the company got backed up by Y Combinator was surely their winning moment. According to Crunchbase, MentalHappy has raised a total of $1.2M in funding over 5 rounds. Their latest funding was raised on March 31, 2021, from a Venture - Series Unknown round. Overall, it is funded by 4 investors out of which Bryan Mahoney and Northwestern Mutual Future Ventures are the most recent investors.
Well, this is one of the companies that I found to be too good to be true, not in terms of their user interface but more of an idea that is quite crisped and embraced in terms of accessing it.
A tantalizing question arises as we say goodbye to the MentalHappy adventure park: Can it handle the influx of eager explorers while maintaining an adequate number of emotional lifeguards on duty? That's why their focus is currently on finding knowledgeable group leaders, some of whom have their own fan bases.
They serve as the rock stars of the field of mental health. We can't wait to see the grand finish of MentalHappy's voyage towards a sparkling, mentally thriving horizon amid the swirl of obstacles and a sprinkling of innovation.
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Edited by Shruti Thapa.
