Families today are different, why isn’t our mental health care?
A message from Mercedes Oromendia, our Chief Clinical Officer
In graduate school I specialized in bicultural identity development, exploring how to help kids develop a positive sense of who they are when they are struggling to mix two or more different backgrounds. Kids often feel pressure to “choose” one identity, while missing out on the messy yet wonderfully rich space of incorporating multiple identities.
In fact, research shows that integrating the different identities, backgrounds, and ways of being, leads to better outcomes in almost all cases. The data is clear… Let’s celebrate the richness that happens when we focus on AND instead of EITHER/OR.
As an Argentinean immigrant, I am intimately familiar with the magical and messy space where two seemingly different ways of being come together- experiencing first-hand the growth that happens when we are confronted with new ways of thinking and doing. (Milk with dinner, peanut butter, and pet health insurance are just a few of the new things I discovered!)
This is precisely what we are doing at Manatee, and what drew me to join the team.
Manatee sits in the intersection of therapy and technology. We sit in that creative, powerful, and uncharted space. We draw from the more than 100 years of therapy research and best practices AND the latest innovative advances in technology and design. We are rethinking how mental health has been and what it can be.
We have used AI, reminders, and specific features on our platform to hone in on the 4 aspects of care that are critical in helping kids and families feel better faster:
- Prevention: Technology allows us to provide kids and parents a large scale education on emotional fitness and access to activities and features that develop their ability to cope with challenges.
- Early detection & diagnosis: Built in assessments automatically identify early and quickly kids who may benefit from therapy or other additional supports.
- Parent/caregiver involvement: Parents are busy and overwhelmed, and often do not know how to best support their child’s mental health treatment. Through our app, parents know exactly how to help their child with their progress outside of therapy. (not to mention streamlined scheduling and virtual sessions increase parent’s participation in sessions).
- Track and celebrate kids’ progress! (and make it fun!): Kids see their progress, earn rewards for completing difficult mental health goals, and have fun while doing so on our app. They can chat with our bot that helps them figure out how they are feeling, write a journal entry, or use our app to help them figure out what they need at that moment.
We did not choose therapy OR technology, but instead decided to carefully consider how and when technology can be used to supercharge therapy.
The secret is that we cannot solve a human problem with a technology-only solution.
At the same time we cannot scale a human solution to meet the scale of the problem.
We have to do both.
And just how kids live today — part grounded in human interaction and part in technology-based interactions. So let’s meet them where they are and provide mental health care that is meaningful in today’s world.
Learn more about our care here. Follow us on twitter, instagram, linkedin, and facebook.
Download our app on the App Store or Google Play.
