Frontiers of Health

Marytha is the Team Leader. She keeps everyone on their toes by developing execution strategy and delegating the group's work to maximize efficiency. She leads by example.

Joy is our Communications Director. She is key to discussions with schools, psychologists, and governmental officials. Her grounded perspective, local connections & communications skills are vital to the platform's success.

Carlos is our Content Developer. This summer, he interned at JP Morgan as a Software Engineer. He spearheads market analysis and creates content for the platform. His market research and understanding of customers' interests are essential.

Aryan is our Technology Developer. His rich experience as a Data Science Professor's Research Assistant and projects in full-stack website development are pivotal to the platform's technical development.

Aryaman is our Financial Planner and Creative Strategist. He developed the business model and cost structure and was critical in turning our startup idea into a fleshed-out business proposal.

Alarmed by the rising rates of depression and suicide among Chinese high school students, combined with a lack of professional psychological services available to them, we are committed to providing free professional psychological services to all Chinese high school students.

We propose to do this by leveraging professional psychologist networks & big data analytics through our platform to provide psychological services to schools at a reasonable price, enabling students to receive easily accessible professional help anonymously through our platform for free.

In the long term, we seek to teach Chinese high school students essential mental health values and help them lead fulfilling lives, address the taboo of mental health in Chinese society, normalize therapy and reaching out, and shatter economic barriers to receiving professional help.

Mental health services in modern China face the same problems as most other Asian-Pacific nations — lack of funding & personnel, insufficient mental health resources and low-capacity services.

1. The financial investment for psychiatric hospitals is just $1.07 USD per capita.
2. There are only 2.19 psychiatrists per 100,000 people.
3. Most professional psychiatrists are concentrated in the more developed regions.

Furthermore, health care costs are growing faster than the GDP. A one-hour consulting session can cost around 1,000 RMB in Shanghai; currently, high-quality therapy is is an economic impracticality for public schools and their students alike.

A 2017 study found that 50% of all students in Shenzhen report high stress, 12% report depression, and 14% report anxiety; and those figures have only grown. As of 2018, suicide in China accounts for more than 25% of all suicides worldwide, and is the fifth-leading cause of death in China.

Even the Chinese government has acknowledged the magnitude of the issue. The 2015-2020 Chinese Mental Health 5-Year Plan discusses steps for schools to take to continue to receive funding, and necessitates the inclusion of psychological counselors in schools. We want to accelerate these changes and take them to the next level through our platform.

Our platform addresses the shortage of psychologists in China by spreading their effectiveness to many students by delegating and overseeing government-certified assistant psychologists trained with specially-crafted modules who, combined with big-data analysis and institutional collaboration with schools and the government, conduct online therapy sessions through text, call, or video for students to have an Anonymous, Anytime, Anywhere guaranteed access to mental health counseling. Certified and professional psychologists are employed under our platform and are paid on a per-hour basis. Certified psychologists will host the sessions with the students while professional psychologists monitor students' progress and manage the assistant psychologists.

We will offer this platform to public and private Chinese high schools directly at an affordable price proportional to the number of students at the school. When a school subscribes to our platform, its students will receive access to the platform for free and can access it through the app or website. They fill out a survey to match with the most suitable psychologist for their specific student profile and requirements. The students can then plan sessions with the psychologists at times convenient for them, and if they are ever discontent with their matched psychologist, they can rematch at any time.

Our product is targeted to serve students in under-developed urban areas and rural provinces who cannot afford private psychological sessions and whose schools lack adequate counseling resources. Due to the stigma surrounding mental health in China, and the immense pressure to succeed and present a positive image, many of these students do not reach out when facing extreme anxiety, stress, or depression. Even if they acknowledge these feelings, they cannot afford private therapy, and do not have time during the school day to have effective counselling sessions with school counselors.

Our product gives them the opportunity to receive the help they may need at times convenient for them. We will guarantee the students' anonymity from the school and other students, to make them feel comfortable with reaching out and connect them to the services they require.

Through our product, we hope to directly provide aid to students during times of high stress (such as during the Gaokao), use big-data analytics to optimize for the best care for the most number of students. In the long term, we wish to address the taboo of mental health, particularly in underdeveloped regions of China.

Due to the traditional beliefs in most parts of China, vulnerability and reaching out to mental services is still associated with weakness, madness and other taboos. Even private therapy practitioners are a rarity in rural, less developed provinces, and inadequate school counselors are seldom an effective option for extremely busy high school students.

Our product will provide experienced therapists to all high school students for free, regardless of socioeconomic background, and allow them to host sessions on their time and convenience. Connecting students from underdeveloped regions to the mental health resources of developed regions accelerates positive social impact and awareness.

All our team members have had personal experiences that have motivated us to address mental health in some shape or form. Upon discovering our common interest in mental services and learning from our Chinese peers the sheer scale of mental issues faced by Chinese high school students, we became determined to work together on a solution.

After extensive research, interviews and surveys, we iteratively molded together our business model. There are currently over 1 million certified assistant psychologists in China. Most, however, aren't actually involved with providing psychological services.

Moreover, Trends show that there is a steady rise in mental health awareness in China, and consequently, a growth in the demand for such services, further encouraged by the government to address the social consequences of poor mental health, particularly among high school students.

So, we decided to use our skill sets to leverage the large professional network of certified psychologists and create a platform to provide large-scale therapy to high school students. Fueled by our personal motivations, our fundamental goals are to spread awareness of mental health in China, help students lead fulfilling lives, address the shortage of qualified psychologists, and, in the long term, de-stigmatize the mental health taboo.

We are all students attending Duke Kunshan University in China. The university's extensive counselling resources juxtaposed against the lack of such resources in our former high schools opened our eyes to how under-developed mental health therapy is in already stress-inducing Southeast Asian high schools, especially compared to Western nations. From our own experiences preparing for the JEE in India, SATs, and the Gaokao itself, we understand first-hand the immense anxiety and stress Chinese students face, and realized the potential of a product that helps them receive the counseling they need.

We all have experienced moments of immense stress and anxiety, and understand what it feels like to not be taken seriously by our parents, peers, or society in general, and how it is especially difficult for us to seek professional help when we need it. In our peers, we realized that a lack of mental health resources in high school was disproportionately common for those of us from South-East Asia. 

On understanding the magnitude of these issues in China, we realized how Gaokao-induced stress has been normalized. We empathize with Chinese students on a deeply emotional level, and want to give them chances to get help that we never received.

With every team member from a different country, we truly embrace the value of diversity, and besides our significant individual skill sets, our combined unique backgrounds and cultural experiences allow us to better understand our customers and their problems and hypothesize truly innovative solutions to the Chinese mental health crisis.

For example, when we first were researching how different forms of online therapy are conducted, we were able to quickly identify and explain to each other how our different home countries and their institutions/enterprises have approached online therapy; and with the communication skills to reach out to Chinese schools and interview psychologists, the technical capability to develop a fully functional, deployment-ready prototype, the data science experience and eagerness to reach out and truly understand our customers, and our personal emotional motivations to provide Chinese high school students with the opportunities they need, we are committed to making our social impact a reality.

We understand that China is poised to directly address one of its largest social issues in mental health, but the infrastructure around mental health services still requires development. We are determined to be the catalyst for that change, and understand that we will have the greatest impact by focusing on the demographic with the greatest need, whom we also intimately understand from our personal experiences: high school students.

The root of the Chinese mental health crisis can be summarized in a single phrase: 'lack of resources'. After we first realized our mutual passion for mental health and formed our team, that was our first and largest roadblock; how do we address raw scarcity?

After countless late-night Zoom brainstorming sessions, interviews and surveys with lawyers, students, psychologists and teachers from both China and our other home countries, we were able to draw inspiration from numerous solutions to come up with one that relied on a key finding from the research we had done: In China, certified assistant psychologists are not permitted to host counseling sessions independently, but professional psychologists can be responsible for sessions held by assistant psychologists!

Professional psychologists are the scarcity; assistant psychologists, unable to pursue higher studies or be taken under professional psychologists, would end up never practicing.

Our solution is hybrid delegation: one professional psychologist oversees 5-10 assistant psychologists, thus making quality counselling affordable to schools, and potentially providing employment to thousands of assistant psychologists!

Thus, our strength against adversity truly lies in our diverse unity; combined with our commitment to help our fellow students, our innovation lies in the unique perspectives we each offer.

I was the Head Student of my high school. Apart from leading 80 prefects and enforcing the school rules, my toughest responsibility was handling complex disciplinary cases.

Authority over your peers is a slippery slope, and I admit I had biases against those offenders I had negative personal experiences with before; but I was committed to my role, so to fight my biases, I promised myself I would personally get to know those 'bad-reputation' rule-breakers. I truly wanted to understand them. 

I came to recognize that almost always, external factors, like broken families, peer pressures and cultural expectations was what really made them what they were. Was disciplinary action helping them, or just making things worse?

Upon this realization, I approached the EXCOs and teachers with my concerns. I convinced them to revise our student discipline approach to an empathy and compassion-centric model, at least temporarily.

It paid off; the demerit rates fell by 10% in the following month, and my changes permanently implemented.

I learnt that the first step to true leadership is humility & personal growth. I had first-hand seen the silent suffering of high school students; since then, I have been committed to helping them.

-Marytha Tan

As stated previously, there is a high number of depression and covered suicidal rate among high school students in China. Most of these students study in schools that already has psychologist but the support they received from these psychologist were minimal. 

Through our platform, students were able to receive remote mental help anytime, anywhere and with any device anonymously. In a short term, such a support could improve overall happiness and emotional stability of the students. Studies shown that students who are emotionally stable tend to perform better in exams. Students who scored better will improve the school's reputation. Parents could be assured that the student's mental health is well take care of. This cyclic effect would ensure all parties such as students, parents and schools will be satisfied.

In a long run, we aim to develop short term training programmes such as Acceptance and Commitment Therapy and Mindfulness therapy for students. Therefore, we help students to learn to appreciate themselves and develop the ability to handle difficult emotions before it comes. As the saying goes, "Prevention is better than Cure".

Our desired goal is that every student in China has the free access to remote professional psychological service anonymously anytime and anywhere. 

We are planning to run the trial run of our platform in August which aims to serve a high school about 3,000 students and offer free services to about 50 students who are interested in participating the trial run. After troubleshooting and improving on the trial run, we aim to promote it to 5 other schools and continually improve the platform.

In five years time, our platform will have gained a solid ground in Kunshan and Shanghai, having about 1,500,000 users and 200,000 of active users. At least 500,000 of students would have tried the platform and received help from it.

Within the next year, we hope to build up our network of professionals (school officials, psychologists, developers, etc...), find investors, and start to test our product.

Within the next five years we aim to be an established and trusted company by high-school students in many urban areas around China, and start to expand to the west of china to start addressing rural areas. We also plan to keep expanding our network of psychologists and have a huge network of more than 3,000 psychologists in our platform.

One of the main challenges is that four of our members are not in China, and not all of them speak fluent Mandarin. The language barrier has limited our connections with psychologists, school officials, and programmers.

Another challenge is the quality control for every single psychology therapy session that we are hosting.

Next, the challenge is the legal concerns of our platform. Our platform is designed to serve the minorities and would require certain permission from parents before students can use them.

Finally, we want to offer a free-month-trial to every school, but we were still lacking of funding to cover all the costs of maintaining the platform and the wages of psychologists.

For the first issue, we are capitalising on our two members that can speak fluent Chinese, namely Marytha and Joy. They have build connections with a number of psychologist and school officials to get this programme rolled out.

Secondly, we have invited a couple of professors and clinical psychologist on board to help us in the development of protocols for quality control. We also referred to WHO's protocol for counselling. We will hire professional psychologists to develop training sessions designed especially to deal with adolescents and for sessions to be held online.

Moreover, we will be working with a legal company to draft the agreements to ensure the user's liability, company's liability and psychologist liability are protected.

Our main goal, however, is to find investors to be able to establish our company, pay the psychologists, and run the platform without making any profit for the first months or years until we get trusted and have enough users to start profiting from it.

Our product is a volume–dependent subscription model. 100% of our revenue will come from the schools using our product. There is no current product that focuses on providing mental therapists tailored for high schools students, or any general online therapy service catered for large groups. 

We will offer annual subscriptions to schools, in which the number of student users from a school determines the cost of the product. The subscription plan will be tailored made for each school after their one month free subscription plan.

In the first two months of setup, it is expected to not earn that much profit until we obtain steady influx of customers. 

Expenses for 1st month: 9,800 USD (extra 5,000 USD in cost for legal fee)

Expenses for 2nd month: 4,800 USD

Additional expenses on platform development and psychologist module development: 30,000 USD

Estimated Expenses from August to December: 59,000 USD

The money will be used to pay for the agency that will help us establish our company, develop our training sessions, train our psychologists, and maintain the platform while we run the free-trials, which includes the wages of our psychologists, maintenance of our platform, and marketing.

Aside from that, we really want to have professional managers, influencers, industry experts, and leaders to coach us on product deliver, specifically in legal and regulatory matters, in our plans for expansion, creating our network of professionals and schools, marking, and raising awareness of mental health as something that should be taken seriously.

In addition, getting the attention of the media would help us in our social marketing campaign, getting reputation from scholars, investors, and students, which will impulse our product and make it easier to be trusted by the public as a trustful company.

We aim to partner with universities with top psychology department in China to attract more talents to join our network and get to know the latest trends in psychology to implement in our service; with local education authorities to reach out to public schools, who are our main target; with mentors and coaches to help us lead our project through the Chinese market, to make it sustainable, bring our project to the next level, and make it last for a long time; and with seasoned lawyers, to address legal issues such as permissions to deliver the product to minors, avoiding being sued by things that could get our of our control.