A different kind of mental health
By: Hillary Lin
Tags: Mental Health, Emotions, Female Founders, Startup, Medicine

Being an internal medicine doctor who works primarily over telemedicine means about 50% of my patients are coming in for mental health.

Has it changed over the pandemic? Sort of. I have roughly the same proportion of mental health patients, just more people overall have now discovered the magic of being able to see your doctor without changing out of your pajamas.

Something I’ve noticed after about a thousand mental health visits is just how empiric the process of treating mental illness is. Meaning, we have a rough theory about what drugs may work for anxiety and depression, but in 75% of cases we’re left trialing one medication after another before we finally settle on one that seems to stick. (For a little while anyways, before we have to switch it due to some new side effect.)

This isn’t always too bad and, given my experience, I’ve gotten pretty good at pinpointing which medicine will work for which type of patient given their history and symptoms. But it did raise to me the importance of intelligent iteration.

More on that later.

The next lesson I’ve taken away from medical treatment of mental illness is exactly how few people *require* medication. I’m not saying medications don’t help mood disorders, or that there aren’t some people who *do* require medication to get better. What I have noticed, however, is that many people coming in with depression, anxiety, burnout, insomnia, and other mental health conditions are turning to medication only because it’s the simplest solution they can get their hands on. And while some of these people need medication to pull them through a short crisis, others are dependent on their medications for years. I found myself wanting to give people a different solution, one that creates a more lasting and fulfilling form of happiness rather than a pill with issues from weight gain to brain fog.

Finally, to respond to the question, “What if everyone had access to therapy?” I think that’d be fantastic, but that wouldn’t address all of the above. After all, even the best therapist is just one person, and I can’t party with my therapist or do the No Pants Subway ride with them (well, I *could* but…I’m just going to go with the reality that most therapists would not feel down with these things). The point is, therapy is wonderful for exactly what it is designed for — helping people through a crisis or to work through trauma. Coaching is great for people who want someone by their side to perform better. But neither of these things give you the magic of socially-supported growth. This kind of community-building tied to real emotional work is rare, and only seen informally or in niches like AA or group therapy. We need more intentionally developed versions of this in our lives.

What I’m building now, with my amazing and dedicated team at Curio, is the start of this new solution — no, really, new movement. We are democratizing mental health by teaching solutions that were previously hidden behind the doors of therapy and coaching. We personalize journeys not only for what problem a new member joins with, but with ongoing iteration to help with constant evolution. We’re giving people real emotional skills to tackle their challenges and goals, and deal with inevitable future crises. And we’re doing this in a way that builds meaningful relationships so that our members are not isolated, but rather belong to a community of like-minded people who want to grow.

Hillary Lin, MD is a Stanford-trained physician and Co-Founder of @joincurio. Join our founding community at https://joincurio.com to experience the movement.