YSE Series: Youth-led Mental Health Solutions, Featuring: Intellect
Social stigma appears to be one of the greatest reasons why people in South East Asia either do not get proper help or may downplay their mental illness. A study was done by the Institute of Mental Health on how Singapore’s youth perceives mental illness shows that children prefer to keep their distance from people suffering from mental illnesses due to perceptions of sufferers being unstable or ‘dangerous’, and while one in seven in Singapore has experienced a mental disorder in their lifetime, more than three-quarters did not seek any professional help.
A Singapore-based startup wants to make the idea of mental health more approachable with an app that offers self-guided exercises based on cognitive behavioural therapy techniques. The social enterprise Intellect is a plug & play mental health tool for companies that helps to take care of people’s emotional well-being.
We spoke to Theodoric Chew, Co-founder of Intellect and experienced professional in the tech startup space, to further understand his journey into social entrepreneurship.
Intellect has reached over 1.5 million downloads globally with 600k+ active users every month. ¨it’s incredible to see how fast those numbers are growing and IT is our biggest motivator to be able to help more and more people! Apart from that, we are very proud to have won a Google Play Award for the best Personal Growth App of 2020¨, shared Theodoric.
1. What is the purpose of your organization and what gaps are you trying to fill?
Chew: Intellect is a tech company that is democratizing access to mental healthcare in Asia. Having had personal experience with mental health issues growing up, I realized that there currently is a gap for mental health, especially in Asia in terms of people that can help. There is also a huge stigma against Mental Health in this region. When people mention mental health issues they quickly jump to conclusions.
Also, I remember having to pay $100-$200 per session to see a therapist, and that it is unaffordable for most of the population to seek for help. Hence, Intellect wants to make mental health care more accessible through tech and scalability.
2. Run us through the journey — how it went from being an idea to a start-up to building it so far.
Chew: We saw this solution as an opportunity for more people to get access to care, telehealth and medicine. Personally, I have been working in the tech space for quite some time before starting Intellect, so I had an idea of how I was going to build it. Using reverse engineering, we started building a product that would eventually reach this end goal. We also kept validating if we had any gaps we missed and pushing the resources into the right areas.
3. What advice would you provide to budding young social entrepreneurs in Singapore?
Chew: Nowadays, it is very sensationalized and trendy to be an entrepreneur. It may make people quite trigger happy at starting their own business. However, it usually takes a long time before new businesses can actually see traction. In that case, to be a successful entrepreneur, you must be in it for the long haul and not the quick wins. It will usually take a few years to see good traction, and in our case, it took us a while to cross 500,000 users. So, yes…it has been quite a journey!
A crucial element for startups working on Mental Health solutions is to be prepared to adapt and pivot your business idea to be able to successfully solve the community needs and issues in this topic. You would need to show to investors, mentors, and other people in the ecosystem, that you are indeed willing to learn from your mistakes and make recommendations into account along the way.
4. How does your product play a role in the bigger picture of mental health within the ecosystem?
Chew: Intellect wants to bring mental well-being to everyone, and it comes in two folds which is to remove the stigma that mental health is a very serious thing to something that everyone will face along their journey, and secondly is to reduce barriers for receiving mental health care for everyone.
This blog is part of our Singapore Youth Social Entrepreneurship (YSE) Series. Stay tuned as in our next few blogs, we will continue to showcase the youth social entrepreneurship ecosystem in Singapore, as well as address some of the main challenges and opportunities for the youth willing to take this journey or already on it.
About Youth Co:Lab
Co-created in 2017 by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and the Citi Foundation, Youth Co:Lab aims to establish a common agenda for countries in the Asia-Pacific region to empower and invest in youth, so that they can accelerate the implementation of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) through leadership, social innovation and entrepreneurship. To learn more about the Youth Co: Lab, visit: https://www.youthcolab.org/
