After three years at the helm of controversial virtual mental health company Cerebral, David Mou has moved on and is ready to try again. He’s teamed up with Thomas Insel to form a new venture that hopes to address what the founders see as skewed incentives that sent many mental health companies down the wrong path.
Mou and Insel are both psychiatrists and Insel, who led the National Institute of Mental Health for over a decade before a stint at Verily, has been a mentor to Mou through a series of startups. A serial entrepreneur himself, Insel said he’s felt “frustration with the digital mental health space and the sense of promise that it brings, but also, so far, its failure to really deliver in terms of public health impact.”
What’s needed, Insel and Mou believe, is some kind of framework, similar to the Food and Drug Administration’s bar for safety and efficacy, to tame the “wild west” of digital mental health. Their observation jibes with the perspectives of researchers and organizations, like the Peterson Health Technology Institute, that are agitating to ensure that the digital health services that flourished in recent years deliver health outcomes to justify their costs.
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