Disrupting the mental health space

When I am not gallivanting about town on the hot lunch circuit, you are likely to find me teaching yoga at Beechwood Gardens.

It was not always thus, but a period of personal distress was greatly ameliorated through this gentle meditative practice and lashings of therapy. I have always been a strong believer in the Ancient Greek dictum “healthy mind, healthy body”. I thought running was doing the trick until what I call “the great escalation” happened, and then I had to throw everything and the kitchen sink at the manifest lack of “wellness” that was unfolding in my life.

I tell you this because it is October and it is mental-health awareness month and because I was having the “yoga epiphany” conversation over a glass of champagne — that other well known elixir of wellness — with a lovely young woman called Leni Bruinders, who invited me to come talk about the mind-body connection on something called The Forest, and to meet the founders of October Health. 

She did not have to ask twice. South Africa has the third-highest suicide rate on the continent with 23 suicides a day at last count and the second-highest rate of suicide among men in the world. It is a global crisis with 4,000 recorded suicides a day.

I meet Allan Sweidan and Alon Lits at Bellinis in Illovo — because obviously! This is the ancestral stomping ground of Joburg’s finance and tech set, where you go to “bump” the guys with a start-up up their sleeve or the inclination to fund one. Over my staple order — feta stuffed crumbed olives and the sinfully brilliant fillet Suzette — they fill me in.

Allan is a clinical psychologist and built what was to become the largest psychiatric hospital group in Southern Africa, Akeso, which was sold to Netcare in 2018. At the time it was treating more than 22,000 patients a year and Allan stayed on the Netcare executive committee till mid-2019.

We are living in a world that is changing really quickly in terms of identity, and people are really grappling with who they are in the world

—  Allan Sweiden

Alon was Uber’s first employee in Africa. He ran the place for seven years and launched into seven countries. In August 2020, millions of Uber rides later, Alon left his role as director of Uber in Sub-Saharan Africa and pondered his next move. 

Allan and Alon had worked across the road from each other all that time but had never met until a mutual friend introduced them. There was a meeting of minds and they realised they shared a preternaturally disruptive instinct. 

They turned their talents to taking on the global mental health industry. Their mission: to address the fact that up to “80% of people who need mental health care don’t get it because of issues including affordability, access to care and stigma”. Their solution is an app that has the potential to democratise the provision of mental health care. 

For Allan, it was personal. “Mental-heath awareness day and month is important for us, which is why we are called October. But it’s a personal story for me, because of my brother who died of addiction in October, and his birthday was in October. So October’s always been a meaningful time for me.”

Allan expands on the foundation story. “I left Netcare, and I’d had some health issues, and I wanted to do something that really felt meaningful for me. I got advice from this mutual friend who asked me, ‘if you were going to go back and do something, what would it be?’ And I said it would still be in the mental health space, where no-one knows how to enter the space. Because you know, if you have an issue around mental health, you just don’t know if you need a psychologist, a psychiatrist? What are the differences? Do you need a social worker? Do you need a nurse? Do you go to your GP?

“I wanted to set something like that up, but I never understood how to use technology to do that.”

Alon picks up the story. “I think the reality, whether you’re looking at Africa or the US or elsewhere, is that mental health is not as accessible as it should be. There’s this chronic shortage of treating professionals, because people are not coming into the system in the way that they should, because of three main factors. One is that the cost of care is very high and this is also often driven by a lack of treating professionals. Two, people don’t know how to enter the system, and three, the stigmas, people don’t just go and admit that they’ve got a mental-health-related problem. So we launched in October 2021 with an app.”

Which is The Forest bit. Alon explains: “We launched with this consumer-facing app, which is free. We’ve designed it to try to give people a way to speak about their mental health or come into the system in a way that’s much softer. So our core feature is live sessions where you can join or open the app at any time and join a conversation about a mental-health topic.”

October Health supplies its business customers with the data-driven tools and insights to address the mental wellness of their staff, without diluting the welcoming and — crucially — anonymous medium of The Forest. And at the end of the month they are launching the first employee wellness index in South Africa, which is much-needed as the statistics on employee mental health point to a worrying loss of productivity and revenue. 

When I ask Allan why he thinks we are in a mental-health crisis his answer resonates. “Part of it is that we are living in a world that is changing really quickly in terms of identity, and people are really grappling with who they are in the world.

“Things that happen very far away feel like they happen very close to us. People are very uncertain about who they are and what the world is at the moment. And we are bombarded with that every single day, all day.

“What we wanted to do, in a way, by creating a platform was almost as an antidote to that. I always used to imagine my kids coming home, and instead of going on to TikTok or another social media platform, going and finding a group in The Forest, where they could find good stuff happening, and life skills and their own communities around things that they were struggling with.”