In honor of World Suicide Prevention Day, our AI therapy at mentla.com is free (no paywalls or tiers). And if you arrive today, will remain free going forwards. Our AI is not (yet!) built for people in a crisis state so if that is you, please please reach out to a mental health professional. Our AI is designed to be preventative. It is designed to help you address those things that you just aren't willing to bring up with another human. Come see how powerful it is.
When I was 19, my uncle, who was my best friend, killed himself. This is what motivated me to get my PhD in psychology. I wanted to understand why my uncle couldn’t let go of his childhood and how that lead to depression and ultimately to suicide. During my post-doc at Stanford, while doing research on rumination and mood disorders, my cousin on my other side of the family reached out to me, leaving a voicemail asking me some questions about the nature of reality and existence. I didn’t realize until too late that it was a call for help. And I didn’t get back to him in time. He killed himself as well. And that motivated me to leave academia. We were making tremendous strides in understanding causes of mental illness but doing so little to scale up solutions that could make a difference. I joined Calm as the founding data scientist. I knew that meditation was a powerful preventative and that if we were able to make it more mainstream, it could have a huge positive impact on the world. And we did it. I used to joke with the head of UA at Calm that she had maybe gotten more people into meditation than any other person in history. At Calm though, we were not great at getting to men though. Nobody really was. The problem with this is that men are 80% of suicides. If we fail to get through to this population, we will never solve the suicide crisis! So my co-founder (Calm’s founding engineer) and I built Mental - the first mental health app for men. We designed it to have cool audio hooks (taught by Navy SEALs and world heavy weight boxing champs) to bring in men who are skeptical of the mental health industry. And then we offered AI therapy for men to go deeper. Men avoid therapy because 1) it makes them feel ashamed and overly exposed and 2) because they worry it is selfish - that they are wasting others' time and taking up precious resources. AI therapy solves these objections. At the start of this year, we launched our 3rd generation AI therapy tech. And it was game changing. It quickly became the men’s favorite feature in the app. Retention was wild. And you have to remember - our guys are generally guys who were skeptical of therapy before arriving. The impact we were having at Mental made us realize it shouldn’t be limited to a population. Many women also suffer in silence. They also hold back concerns and fears because they are worried about being judged. Every damn year almost 200k women also kill themselves. So we launched Mentla. AI therapy for everyone. Today is International Suicide Prevention Day. I believe that AI therapy, while still in need of more research and not yet built for people in crisis states, is the CRITICAL TOOL that will finally address the suicide crisis. I want everyone to understand the power of this tool. So in the spirit of the day, Mentla is free. And if you arrive today, it will remain free for you going forwards too. No paywalls or tiers.