Name: Brainstorm Health 2023 - Prepare Your Mind: The Journey To Launch A Mental Health Startup
Uploaded: 2023-04-27
Duration: 16 min 28 s
Description: Zak Williams, Co-founder and CEO, PYM Moderator: Chrissy Farr, OMERS Ventures

Zak Williams, Co-founder and CEO, PYM 
Moderator: Chrissy Farr, OMERS Ventures

Brainstorm Health 2023 - Prepare Your Mind: The Journey To Launch A Mental Health Startup 

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The Journey To Launch A Mental Health Startup 

So next up, we're going to be talking about mental health. Um May 1st coming up is the start of Mental Health Awareness Month, which is so important because according to the National Institute of Mental Health, nearly one in five adults lives with a mental illness. Our next guest has experienced first hand the difficulties, the strains and heartbreak that mental health issues can bring. He's a friend of mine. Um His wife is a very old friend of mine as well. Um Zach Williams is the son of the late great actor and comedian Robin Williams. As you probably remember, Robin Williams died by suicide in 2014. He suffered from undiagnosed Louie body dementia, a brain disease that causes a decline in mental abilities and mobility. It's the second most common type of progressive dementia after Alzheimer's disease, Zach said his own mental health went into overdrive after his dad's death. But his personal winding journey as he's called, it led him to where he is today. Zach is a vocal mental health advocate and the co-founder and CEO of Prepare your Mind, also known as P MA company designed to help others achieve mental wellness. Let's hear more about his personal and professional journey right now, please welcome Zack. Yeah. Um So let's just start out by kind of grounding us in where we're at now. Um You've been in mental health a long time, but the past say decade, it's been your life mission and, and a lot of where you spend your, your time. So why mental health of, of all the things that you could have done and, and focused on? Sure, great question. You know, I, I didn't set out to be a mental health advocate. At the beginning of my career, I have a background in consumer technology, entertainment, and media. And after my dad died by suicide, I was diagnosed with complex PTSD generalized anxiety disorder and depression and was doing super unhealthy things like self medicating using alcohol. And uh I realized something had to change. Ultimately, that path to change started in the prison system at San Quentin Prison where I started teaching a financial literacy class. Ultimately, I segued into mental health advocacy because it gave me more of an opportunity to share my journey, be vulnerable and also learn from others around what they're doing to manage their mental health while I could support organizations around strategic support, organizational development, fundraising and so forth. And so through that journey, I realized I could actually start healing my trauma through service. And I discovered that service is my path to happiness. And so for me, it's an ongoing journey to learn more about myself and find meaning and joy through service. So, one of the things we, we've been talking about the past few days is the pandemic. And um I think, you know, for a lot of us, we're still living the after effects of it and, and arguably still in the midst of it. I mean, Dr Walker was here yesterday. Um speaking about how many cases that that still continue to be, but we've been left with this with this sense of shared trauma and most of us probably haven't dealt with it. Um So what do you think we need to do to heal from this experience? And, and by the way, it's not even just the, the pandemic, it's, you know, everything going on with the markets right now and, and recession, people losing their jobs. Um Yeah. Well, I mean, there's a confluence of things that are going on in the world related both to the pandemic, but also our media environment, our political environment. Now, the emerging economic environment with market correction and so forth, that's creating uh an overload for people. There's a physiological component to that. We all have a static systems and when the aesthetic system is overloaded, we feel overwhelmed. We have chronic stress issues, it leads to all sorts of medical and health conditions. Um And so, you know, from our end, we started a company, my wife Olivia June, who's in the audience today um turned me on to nutritional solutions. Uh when I was having a really tough time and decided to not use um specific things like pharmaceuticals because they made me feel numb and so forth. So, you know, in seeking support and help, I discovered amino acid formulations to help me specifically. And that, that combined with some behavioral lifestyle considerations like meditation, mindfulness, community support for me specifically, but also, you know, for other people, therapy is very helpful, other things like breath work can be very helpful. And, and you know, through my personal journey, I realized that there were populations all throughout the US and the world that were experiencing extreme amounts to overwhelm our medical system, specifically our mental health care system in the US. But also abroad was not equipped to manage crisis care at scale that this sense of overwhelm this collective trauma was activating in people and one in one in five now experiencing mental illness, we just, I mean, I can't imagine that we could ever produce enough enough therapists to keep up with it. It's, it's an ongoing question in consideration is can we train enough people? And, and you know, there were triage solutions like enabling nurse practitioners during the pandemic to provide uh prescriptions for uh you know, mood stabilizers, mental health meds and so forth and you know, that's, that is a triage solution, right? And, and you know, there likely aren't enough nurse practitioners who can be trained in a specific way to manage the population at scale and their mental health needs. So, you know, I think we need to actually start orienting towards looking at preventative solutions and lifestyle interventions as a means of providing support for people. Because there's just not enough people, there's, you know, in, in, in counties in the US, there's one psychiatrist for 5000 people and uh it just blows your mind. Yeah. And so, you know, there are institutions that are, that are doing incredible work, whether it's Stanford Medical School, um what's going on at the Meta Psychiatry Center? There is fascinating in terms of how lifestyle interventions can help retrain people's metabolism and so forth towards managing their mental health conditions. But uh you know, also practically, I mean, there's a lot going on and it's, it's almost too much to cover uh over the course of an entire day. So, you know, um hard to do it in 15 minutes. Exactly. Right. Um If anybody has questions in the audience, feel free to chime in otherwise I have so much more to ask you. Um So the role of celebrity in, in this discussion, you've, you've obviously grown up with kind of one ft in the entertainment world. Do you think that Hollywood L A has a big role to play in just kind of reeducating, raising awareness around mental health? And has Hollywood done a good job overall with that? Um As you kind of survey, what's out there? Yeah. Well, I'd say, you know, it, it's a complex consideration. You know, first we need to actually look at the definition of stigma and how stigma manifests in people. Stigma in many ways is a protection mechanism for people. It's helped, it's helped them get through potential periods of their life. It helps them feel safe or isolate for situations that make them feel uncomfortable. But if you actually break apart what Sigma is, it's a collection of biases. And we actually need to look at the underlying biases that occur in things like media and so forth. And the first thing we need to do is acknowledge them. That's the first step. There are biases that could be perceived as positive that help us better connect with people and so forth. But, you know, in the case of stigma, it's generally negative biases that isolate us from people that generally lead to negative interactions and so forth. But um in the case of Hollywood and so forth, we don't flag and identify those biases in their individual. Um you know, in their individual, right? Versus just saying, hey, we need to break down stigma. It's OK. Not to be OK. We actually, I think need to take a deeper dive and start establishing more research around how we can better frame conversation and language around that collection of biases that generally can have negative effects upon people and populations. So it sounds like we're at kind of step one of a very long journey that, that we should be, you know, going much deeper on. And I agree with you. That's not enough to say something like it's ok to not be ok. Like we can do, we can do better than that. Um Talk me through your suicide hotline. You have a, that was something that you, you spoke about recently and I just listened to a podcast you did on it. Um Well, to know more about, yeah. No, I I'd love to speak more about it. Um First off, you know, just wanna frame it's OK to say it's OK not to be OK. The, the main consideration is I think people who are in, whether they're influencers or celebrities need to be uh need to have access to information and evidence back solutions that better help them share scientific medical information and make it accessible relative to the uh the podcast series we did around 988. It was called Call For Help. And we worked with Lemonade Media, which is a wonderful organization focused on mission oriented content. And what we did is we broke down how the sausage is made around developing and deploying a government backed program around mental health crisis. And so we talked to everyone from Tom Insel, uh who, who ran, who ran N I mh, we talked to um several congressmen, uh congress people. We, we spoke with mental health advocates we spoke with researchers, we spoke with clinicians and really started understanding how challenging it is to establish um evidence backed navigation solutions that could evolve a narrative around what it means to get help. Um Because often the case is when you're in mental health crisis and you dial 911 you're going to elicit a law enforcement response when 95 times out of 100 you don't need one. And so, you know, it's about establishing more focused precision oriented navigation solutions and, and it was, it was fascinating to learn how everything was done and it's challenging. It's still in the works. It launched in July of last year and it, it's had incredible adoption and using things like text and so forth. It, it, it's enabled, uh it's enabled the, the, the access and accessibility of, of the service to expand greatly. And so it was fascinating. Congratulations. That's incredible work. Um Any questions from the, from the audience? Alright. Oh, here we go. Hi Emily. She with a worldwide. Um, hi. So my, my husband is actually, he's been an, er, nurse for 20 years and he's going back to school right now to become a psychiatric mental health nurse practitioner and will be able to prescribe medication. Um uh but I've been kind of talking to him about, you know, don't be one of those just throw pills at people. There's so many other, you know, solutions and, and so my question to you is are you doing anything? I know you're direct to consumer right now. But are you doing, doing anything with, you know, provider education or any other distribution channels? Because I think, oh my God, I'm so happy you asked me that question. So, so yes, we, we started with direct to consumer and expanded into retail. We're expanding quite rapidly into retail. So we need to focus specifically in retail scaling right now. We're doing two randomized controlled trials which are multi leg studies this year starting with uh our mood shoes, which is for which will be, you know, the disease claim that we're seeking to establish is for anxiety relief. And then for an upcoming attention to that, we seek to provide a disease claim around ADHD support for, we can't yet do that and we need to establish trials for that. Ultimately, we'd love to see our products qualified as medical foods so that they can be distributed through the doctor recommended channels. The key thing for us and really what it's about is accessibility and expanding people's awareness around things like natural solutions that are just an expansion of the tool kit. You know, it's not about replacing pharmaceuticals, it's about, you know, giving people an option and an opportunity to discover natural solutions involving things like distilled nutrition for mental well being because our collective neurotransmitter health um in many cases in the US, specifically with the western diet leads to deficiencies. I'll give you an example for things like Gaba, which we need to manage our Gaba system that's present in, in high concentrations and things like fermented foods, which we don't get a ton of in the western diet. And then things like supporting uh psycho biotics that help develop and evolve the serotonin synthesis environment with the microbiota. We're not getting a lot of things to help support that environment in terms of the Western diet. I'm, I'm speaking in aggregate. So there's a, there's a, there's a, there's some nuances to it. Um expanding beyond that. Um The thing is uh consumer preference, Americans preference is changing 66% of, of Americans who are open to taking mental health products prefer taking natural products. So the environment is changing. That wasn't the case four or five years ago, you know, four years ago, pre pandemic, it was 50% before that. It was much less. And so, so we just want to find uh opportunities to, to establish, you know, clinically backed solutions to support people around their mental health and mental well-being journeys. Well, if there's one takeaway, it's that there is no one size fits all. Um So thank you so much for being here with us and think, you know, enjoy the rest of your evening. It's just been a wonderful conference so far. Thanks everybody. So with that, we are wrapping up brainstorm health 2023. Um on behalf of the brainstorm health coach, chairs and Fortune. I want to express my thanks to all of our discussion, leaders and speakers. Um I also want to extend our tremendous gratitude to our event partners, Bristol Myers Squibb, City of Hope CV S Health, the health care, Sage Therapeutics and our academic partner, Stanford Medicine. Thank you so much for your partnership and we are thrilled to announce Fortune Brainstorm Health 2024 is going to return to Southern California again next spring. It's going to be held May 20th and 21st. So please mark your calendars in Dana Point. By the way, don't come here, it won't be here. Um, and uh please join us at the reception in just a few minutes on the ballroom terrace that starts at five o'clock. Thank you so much to all of you for being here for participating um, in all of the conversations and enjoy the reception, safe travels.