Five Questions and an Elevator Pitch: My Journey

1. What is the need that your project seeks to address?

Ananya: This project specifically targets mental health-related issues, anxiety in particular, and the stigma and stressors that youth within the queer or LGBTQ+ community often experience. Our hope is to make support more accessible and improve mental health outcomes.

The onset of over half of all anxiety disorders is in adolescence. There are more than 1 million LGBTQ+ adolescents in the US. This group has a disproportionately high incidence of anxiety that is amplified by unmet social, personal, and cultural needs in the path to care. LGBTQ+ teens are three times more likely to experience anxiety, yet 60% of queer youth who want mental health support do not receive it, according to The Trevor Project.

Cognitive behavioral therapy [CBT] is an effective therapeutic approach for helping people identify ways to improve their mental health conditions, considering the unique life circumstances of different individuals. However, the existing CBT-based digital health platforms lack specificity for the unique experiences of the queer teen community.

Twan: Current mental health solutions specifically for LGBTQ+ adolescents are centered around mental health crises. There is a deep lack of longitudinal interventions designed for LGBTQ+ youth before these acute crises occur.

2. How does your solution work?

Ananya: As part of the Biodesign for Digital Health class, our team noticed there are a lot of “one size fits all” CBT apps out there like Calm, Headspace, Happify, and Clarity, but nothing targeting the unique personal and societal issues faced by LGBTQ+ youth. We brainstormed how we could personalize CBT to make it easily accessible to a population that is under-represented in the digital mental health space. We bridge this gap with My Journey, a queer-focused CBT delivery platform that offers evidence-based skillset education and practices to teens at minimum cost via an annual subscription-based, sell-to-schools business model.

How it will work is that a user will log in, enter their information discreetly with their privacy protected, and indicate what type of help they're seeking. Let’s say a teen is facing harassment from someone at their high school regarding their queer identity, and they might not feel safe telling their parents or friends. Or, they might be concerned about embracing their identity, transitioning to queer life, overcoming stigma, contemplating coming out, managing trauma, wondering about their future, or being part of a community. The My Journey app would provide a personalized journey for them, acknowledge the real-life challenges and discrimination they face, acting as a safe, calming haven.

Their personal journey includes educational content, bringing clarity to the underlying causes of the well-being concerns of the user, and suggested contemplative exercises such as breathing or mindfulness, habit building, mood journaling, gender affirmative letters, and queer professional resources and consultation.

As we’re designing the app, we’re building gamified features into the platform to sustain teen user engagement. It will incorporate a point-based system, so as users engage over time, they gather points and receive recognition on the app.

Through our engaging platform, we hope to increase adherence to CBT plans to 3+ weeks of engagement and, ultimately, play a role in reducing LGBTQ+ teen suicide attempts. The app can also benefit other stakeholders, including therapy providers, by reducing the burden of care via a prevention strategy for LGBTQ+ teens. It could even impact school boards by bringing awareness to the subject of queer mental health, hopefully leading to policy reforms that strengthen access to mental healthcare in schools. We also plan to incorporate resources into the app for allies, so that family and friends can improve their knowledge and attitudes regarding LGBTQ+ health, and help de-stigmatize queer anxieties for parents and loved ones. And, we’ll offer specific resources for LGBTQ+ teens of color, as well as those experiencing other axes of inequality.

Importantly, we’re actively seeking perspectives from psychologists and psychotherapists involved in CBT and mental health to help us understand how to best optimize a digital space for someone dealing with issues related to their LGBTQ+ identity.

3. What motivated you to take on the project? And what activities have you undertaken?

Ananya: What motivated me personally is the chance to build a crucial innovation that could have a real impact on teens in need. It means a lot for me to be involved in the healthcare technology pathway, especially as I have previously worked on projects in the field of biodesign and would love to spearhead meaningful developments in this area.

Last quarter in the Biodesign NEXT program, we worked on refining our need insights and fine-tuning our research to ensure we create a unique app that’s grounded in scientific evidence. We did this based on primary insights from interviews, as well as secondary research. I also worked with another team member, Zahra, to analyze the competitive market and select our app’s main features, to offer maximum competitive advantages to our target users. We also developed our go-to-market strategy after comprehensive research on market opportunities in the digital mental health space.

We’re currently developing the wireframes and models for a minimum viable product, and gathering developers and software experts to help with this. We’re also contacting more LGBTQ+- and CBT-focused psychotherapists for their perspective.

Twan: Our team involves LGBTQ+ individuals and those with close friends in the LGBTQ+ community who have experienced the gaps that exist in mental health services, and the impact on their mental health. These experiences motivated us to create a resource that could close these gaps for future generations of LGBTQ+ youth.

4. What are the most important things you learned in advancing your project?

Ananya: In theory, it sounds simple to create an app. But there’s so much more to it than you expect, with many reiterations, nuances, and setbacks, and lots of research. It has been a very detailed, rigorous, and multi-layered project, but that’s what makes it exciting. We can envision the potential to have an actual impact and create change in a community or multiple communities that need innovative, personalized solutions. And what’s interesting and so unique is that our Stanford Biodesign coaches have held our hand through the entire process, giving us the support and foundation we need to move forward with our project.

5. What advice do you have for other aspiring health technology innovators?

Ananya:  Keep at it. It's all about persistence and motivation. Have the mindset that, yes, there may be drawbacks and challenges. People might question what you’re doing. And sometimes it may seem like your idea or project has no point or potential. But don’t let doubts hold you back. Keep that motivation to make a difference and let it push you forward.