A Genius Bar for Mental Health: Announcing Our Investment in Advekit

Advekit Raises $2.6M in Seed Funding Led by Moment Ventures to Grow the Market for its Mental Health Platform

 

Have you ever taken in your computer or phone in for a general check up? You know, everything works but there’s a few quirks and dings, but you just decide that even though you’re running at 100mph with a bazillion things in your schedule, that today, you’re going to schedule an appointment at the Apple Genius Bar or with the Geek Squad and tell them that you just want to give your device the 24-point Jiffy Lube treatment?

Yeah, I didn’t think so — no one does that.

If you’re like me, even though your computer or phone is likely one of your most important worldly possessions, you endure and even start to get used to the quirks and weird things that happen for months or years on end, until one day it hits the wall and is D.O.A. when you try and boot up. And when that happens, your world turns upside down. Everything comes to a screeching halt and you’re desperately on the hunt for help from anyone who can help you figure out what’s wrong.

Hitting the Mental Block

Oddly enough, we sort of treat our minds in the same way. Even though our mental health well-being is likely the most important thing for us to make our way through life, we’re usually pretty dismissive of the little quirks and oddities swirling around in our subconscious and just plow ahead with our daily lives. Sure, there are countless numbers of ways to help us keep things under control: yoga, the Calm app, exercise, texting a hotline, talking with a friend, and many more, but if it ever gets to the point that we hit that proverbial wall — the green screen of death in our brains — that we finally decide that it’s time to get some professional help. And by that point, you’re desperate to talk to someone, anyone to help you figure out what’s wrong, except that in your most vulnerable state, you have no idea how to go about finding help. Who do you call, where do you find someone who’s available ASAP, and how do you know that they’re qualified to deal with what you’re experiencing, and how much is this going to cost? There’s no Yelp for therapists and asking for recommendations from your Facebook friends seems like a non-starter. Believe it or not, until recently the most popular way to find a therapist was sifting your way through a Yellow Pages-like directory (see photo) where you get to do all of the leg and paper work.

Read the rest on Medium.

Credit: Shutterstock/Paul Craft