Headspace Health’s Leslie Witt on the future of mental health: Meditation, text-based coaching, teletherapy, telepsychiatry, and community

Q&A: How Head­space Health’s acqui­si­tions alter its men­tal health prod­uct (Mobi­Health­News):

Head­space Health has revealed two acqui­si­tions this year, the lat­est com­ing ear­li­er this month when the dig­i­tal men­tal health com­pa­ny announced the pur­chase of men­tal well­ness app Shine.

In a crowd­ed field of men­tal health star­tups, the com­pa­ny is using acqui­si­tions to aug­ment its prod­uct and add new capa­bil­i­ties … Head­space Health also scooped up Sayana, mak­er of AI-enabled men­tal health-track­ing and sleep apps. And Head­space itself is the result of a merg­er between med­i­ta­tion app Head­space and vir­tu­al men­tal health­care com­pa­ny Gin­ger, which closed near­ly a year ago.

Mobi­Health­News: You’ve been at Head­space for about two years, not too long before the merg­er with Gin­ger. How has the expe­ri­ence changed from the prod­uct point of view?

Leslie Witt, Head­space Health’s chief prod­uct and design offi­cer: … I fun­da­men­tal­ly believe in the pow­er of mind­ful­ness and med­i­ta­tion tools, but they can’t serve all men­tal health needs. And par­tic­u­lar­ly when some­one’s in a state of acute anx­i­ety, acute depres­sion, they need access to pro­fes­sion­al, human services.

For Head­space, it led to a direct real­iza­tion that we had no viable and fast paths for­ward with­out merg­ing, and Gin­ger was the per­fect part­ner to pair with. We’ve been work­ing across that land­scape of ser­vices for the last year to ensure that we tru­ly can open the front door to care for all. That we can learn who you are, what you need, assess your goals, triage you in a per­son­al­ized capac­i­ty to the right kind of hand­off of care, to the right begin­ning. And get you on a path where we’re real­ly estab­lish­ing the dimen­sions of a life­long men­tal health jour­ney, help­ing you build habits of prac­tice that give you deep­er self-care capa­bil­i­ty that then can scale up when the need occurs..

We are build­ing out what I often call the mid­dle piece, the bridge that exists between the self-serve con­tent in the Head­space app and the text-based coach­ing, telether­a­py and telepsy­chi­a­try of the Gin­ger service.

And then, last but not least, I think we have a lot of oppor­tu­ni­ty around com­mu­ni­ty. We see folks almost engag­ing in kind of cohort-based ways around cer­tain areas of content.

News in Context:

• Head­space and Gin­ger merge to expand and scale up dig­i­tal men­tal health
• Med­i­ta­tion app Head­space rais­es $93 mil­lion in equi­ty and debt to accel­er­ate clin­i­cal val­i­da­tion and geo­graph­ic expansion
• The Nation­al Acad­e­my of Med­i­cine (NAM) shares dis­cus­sion paper to help empow­er 8 bil­lion minds via the eth­i­cal adop­tion of dig­i­tal men­tal health and neurotech