Why We’re Pivoting to Focus Our Launch on the Education Market
According to the National Alliance on Mental Illness, “one in five youth have a mental health condition, with half of mental health conditions developing by age 14. Yet, less than half of youth with mental health conditions received any kind of treatment in the past year.” 3.7 million students are expected to graduate from high schools in the United States in the 2020–21, reports the National Center for Educational Statistics. If one in five youth will develop a mental health condition, and less than 50% get any treatment, then American high schools are effectively graduating 377,400 students a year with undiagnosed or untreated mental health conditions.
NAMI states further that, “since children spend much of their productive time in educational settings, schools provide a unique opportunity to identify and treat mental health conditions by serving students where they already are.” Given the amount of students who are unable to access mental health resources, this means that once they are out of an educational context, that crucial opportunity to intervene begins to go away.
We’re launching How’s Today as a product that helps school districts proactively detect who might be experiencing a mental health condition, who school psychologists & counselors need to reach out to, and to help schools refer students to mental health resources as needed.
How’s Today asks students about their wellness and how they feel about their school environment once or twice a year as a check-in, then processes the answers and forwards them as a report to a school’s counselor (or relevant office).
By proactively asking students about how they feel and if they’re having challenges or not, then counselors can help exactly who they need to and the burden of reaching out to wellness resources isn’t placed on the student or their parents.
Students who are experiencing a serious mental health concern can be referred to more intensive treatment, while those who are experiencing mild anxiety can be provided with advice and resources. How’s Today can be added to any educational system as it ambiently asks questions of students and reports that feedback to an existing wellness structure.
We’ve decided to focus on this specific use-case and market because we believe that there’s a great need for proactive mental health resources in educational systems. We believe that by asking students about their school life passively and keeping track if problems occur, mental health interventions can happen before a student leaves the educational system.
The most immediate impact could be in detecting serious mental health conditions as they develop, when the conditions are most able to be treated. According to NAMI, “4.6% of U.S. adults experienced serious mental illness in 2018.” If applied to the total amount of high school students, and with most conditions developing by age 14, a proactive solution could begin to catch serious mental conditions and mitigate years of mental illness.
Another group that could benefit from proactive wellness are college students, specifically incoming freshman and transfer students. In a recent survey of university and college counselor center directors, according to the American Psychological Association, “seventy percent of directors believe that the number of students with severe psychological problems on their campus has increased in the past year.”
How’s Today is a simple solution that can make a big impact by working with any school system’s existing wellness resources, and for that reason we think an educational use-case is a great launching point for How’s Today.
To learn more, visit our website or follow How’s Today on Instagram, Facebook or Twitter.
