Gaia Medical

Our vision is to provide people in MENA with the mental health resources they need regardless of their language, location or finances.

Roughly 22% of people in MENA struggle with a mental health condition. We recognised a huge unmet need for psychological support. We identified 3 core problems:

1. Lack of mental health education & resources

2. Community stigma

3. Insufficient therapists & therapy options

We solve these 3 problems by offering:

1. Mental health articles, videos and courses.

2. A safe online community where people receive peer support.

3. Access to UK therapists for online therapy in their native language.

Untreated mental illness negatively influences poverty, employment, safety, and the local economy. When mental health is not maintained, the whole community suffers.

Giving people access to mental health support, not only gives them a chance to improve their own lives, but also the lives of their families and communities.

Although MENA is our focus, Iraq is one of the most psychologically underserved countries in this region, so we’ve decided to start there. 

For over a century, Iraq and its people have been ravaged by war and conflict. This has not only worsened the community’s mental health, but also led to a broken healthcare system and a shortage of mental health professionals.

 As of 2017, there are less than 6 working psychiatrists and psychologists for every 1 million people in Iraq. Compare that to the UK, where the figure is nearly 200. Yet, the need for help in both countries is similar: for example, 4.5% of Iraqis struggle with anxiety, while 4.3% of Brits struggle with anxiety too. The numbers in Iraq are also likely to be even higher because they lack the infrastructure to capture that information accurately.

The shortage of mental health professionals, as well as the weakened healthcare system, has led to a decline in the level of care and a push towards medication as a treatment option. Through user research, we found that individuals who already face cultural stigma for seeking help, often also distrust the local services that do exist and avoid getting treatment altogether.

Healthcare is never one-size-fits-all, so we built a holistic online platform that combines education, community, and access to therapists.

Education: Based on user feedback, many people expressed that mental health is something that they wished to learn about on their own. Through our platform, they can access articles, videos, and courses in Arabic. These tools help them manage their mental health at their own pace. 

Community: Because mental health is not something openly spoken about within the Iraqi community, many of our users expressed feeling isolated in their mental health struggles. We've built a safe online space for people to receive peer support, share resources, and create a sense of community.

Access: We continually receive requests from people wanting to speak to a therapist. Because of distrust for local services, we designed an online therapy service that gives people access to Arabic-speaking therapists in the UK. We use an income-based fee model to address the challenge that therapy is often too expensive for many people in Iraq.

Most digital solutions ignore our demographic entirely, or treat them as an afterthought. We created our solution specifically with Iraq in mind, by removing barriers such as language, cultural stigma, and financial hardship.

We serve the people in Iraq who want or are in need of mental health support. These are individuals who are open-minded to learning about and improving their mental health. Currently, they’re unable to easily access local or global mental health services because of distrust, inadequate resources, family restrictions, community stigma or finances. They are largely self-treating from information online but are also open to getting professional help outside of Iraq.

From the very beginning, we’ve applied a human-centred approach to our product development. We understand that we are not developing this product for us, we are developing it in service of our community, and thus they need to help guide us on what’s best for them.

We’ve conducted two wide-scale user surveys. We received over 750 responses which led us to first focus on health education, and then later to refine our scope and focus on mental health support and online therapy. 

We also spoke one-on-one to 12 members of the community during in-depth user interviews. Their feedback helped us to deeply understand the main pain points within both the healthcare system as a whole, and the mental health sector specifically. It was really their input that made us realise how open people were to doing online therapy but that there was also this need to give them more than one option, such as community support and self-guided learning.

Our approach to user research is ongoing - we don’t stop after just conducting a couple of surveys and user interviews. We utilise a number of different user research methods to help guide us on a regular basis, including opinion polls and daily community interaction. To further support this, members of our team are Iraqis living in Iraq and are therefore able to help provide insights from a user perspective.

As we've seen in the past year, disease outbreaks can have an immense impact on mental health. Technology has helped to bring more mental health awareness, resources and support to isolated individuals, but this has been largely limited to the Western world. Communities in MENA are equally in need of support, but they aren't being reached. 

Our solution brings resources available in the West, to people in the East. There really is no better time than now to introduce this solution; the current pandemic has made it more acceptable for people to admit they're struggling, simply because everybody is struggling. 

We began our online therapy pilot in May 2021. We opened up applications for beta-testers and received over 380 submissions within a month. We selected 6 users from Iraq, Egypt and the UAE to begin with. 

Since the pilot began, we've conducted 3 successful therapy sessions with our 2 UK-based therapists. We have an additional 3 sessions scheduled for this month, and have now opened up the pilot to all website users and the other beta-test applicants.

No other solutions have taken the time to address this demographic or the problems that prevent them from getting mental health support. We have built a unique product that removes barriers by incorporating the following:

1. Arabic-speaking therapists: Few online therapy solutions offer Arabic-speaking therapists, but being able to express yourself in your mother tongue is essential for therapy. With our platform, users can find a variety of therapists that speak their language.

2. Sliding-scale fees: Most solutions focus on wealthier communities that can afford traditional therapy prices. We are one of few platforms that remove this barrier by considering each user's income level, and matching them to a treatment price they can afford.

3. Ability to pay via mobile carrier: Most solutions don't recognize that many Iraqis don't have a bank account, so they can't pay for online services using more traditional methods. People usually have a mobile phone though, so our users are also able to make mobile payments.

4. Self-guided tools and resources: Many platforms focus only on therapy, but not everybody wants it. Our users can choose between other tools and resources to help them build healthier mental habits on their own.

The biggest impact that we can have is to reach people who are currently not being reached. As long as someone has an internet connection, we can help them. 

If Gaia Medical didn’t exist, certain members of the Iraqi community would be left with little to no options for therapy and mental health support.

We believe we'll be able to have the most meaningful impact on our therapy clients and our online community members.

The current number of people we are serving: Since we have started our controlled pilot (without limited marketing efforts), we have had over 400 clients apply to use our online therapy services. We have conducted therapy sessions with 3 beta-testers so far. We also have over 8,700 members and followers in our online community platforms.

In 1 year: In a year's time, we aim to have 350 monthly clients for online therapy, and over 24,000 members and followers of our online community platforms.

In 5 years: In 5 year's time, we aim to have over 1 million community followers and members, and reaching over 4,800 online therapy clients per month.

We measure our impact goals as follows:

(1) Increasing reach by increasing access to mental health resources - We measure this by the number of people signing up for our services and community platforms. We track this monthly and make adjustments as needed to ensure our reach is consistently growing.

(2) Improving mental health symptoms - We measure this by tracking if there is an improvement in how people are actually feeling through the use of symptom severity tests such as the PHQ-9 and GAD-7 that measure depression and anxiety.

(3) Reducing the stigma around mental health - We measure this by regularly surveying members of our community around their perceptions of mental health and tracking if this improves over time.

Through setting monthly targets and daily reminders to review our goals, we ensure that we are really clear about what our key priorities and next steps are. Our daily reminders help us stay on track and also allow us to make fast and frequent pivots that are necessary to meet our goals.

There are currently 13 people on our solution team:

• 2 executive team members:

  • CEO / founder - full-time

  • Business development & operations - freelancer

  • Country manager (Iraq) - volunteer

• 1 freelance social media manager

• 1 freelance translator

• 5 freelance medical writers

• 1 freelance safeguarding lead

• 2 contract therapists

We are an international mix of highly-skilled and creative business and medical professionals who are passionate about the vision that quality healthcare is a human right, not a privilege. 

Our mission is heavily guided by our own personal experiences of mental health struggles and our close ties to the MENA community. Several of us are originally from MENA, or have family and friends living there. We have witnessed the widespread yet unspoken reality of mental health struggles that our community faces. We understand the incredibly complex factors that play into the negative experiences our communities face, and how the lack of open conversation about them perpetuates the problems. Hearing close family members share these experiences and seeing the lasting negative effects they have is the core reason why we are so deeply committed to our work. 

To further support this, our executive team has a combined 8 years of experience working in digital healthcare startups, and over 5 years of experience in the medical field, making us well accustomed to the challenges faced within the digital health sector, and better able to identify and implement effective solutions to those challenges. 

Our fantastic team of UK-based doctors write and review all of our health content to ensure it’s medically accurate and trustworthy, and our team of highly-trained and experienced BACP-registered UK therapists conduct the therapy sessions.

Our business advisors are also specifically experienced in teletherapy, psychology, international business and medicine, and they are invaluable to helping guide our company strategy.

Given the nature of our business, our team is international and it is absolutely essential for us to work cross-culturally to implement our solution. Our founding team’s experience working in start-ups and the medical sector has also meant that we’ve often found ourselves on the harmful side of lack of diversity and inclusion. We’ve personally experienced the toxicity that can come with a lack of diversity, and how detrimental it can be to a business. 

These experiences have shaped us into being radically aware and intentional about the team we select. This is part of the reason why we chose to begin a new venture - we want to build something truly useful for the world, but we also want to play a part in helping shift the often toxic and unsustainable working environments within companies.

We are purposeful about creating a diverse work environment not only to help combat discrimination, but also because we know how important different experiences, personalities and people are to creating an effective product and business.

To build a sustainable and independent company, it's important to us that we can generate revenue early on. We have just launched our online therapy pilot, so we are not quite there yet. Winning this grant would go a long way in helping us get there. Primarily, we'd use the funds to add additional members to our team, such as a technical expert to help us build our solution and a great legal firm to structure our contracts and ensure international compliance.

We are also excited about the incredible network we would be joining. We want to be surrounded by like-minded, socially conscious people. In the startup world, a lot of business advice we receive is focused on profits over social impact. We want to achieve both and would benefit from being surrounded by other people who feel the same way and are coming up with creative solutions to do so.

We would also be looking to receive support for the weakest parts of our business, primarily the business model and technical build. We currently don't have technical or financial modelling experience within our team, so working with mentors to help us establish a solid business model and technical roadmap would be crucial to achieving our long-term impact goals.

As a grant winner, the following resources would greatly help get us closer to reaching our long-term impact goals:

• Business model: Creating a business model that allows us to charge our demographic a price that they can afford, and still pay our therapists and team a fair wage is one of the biggest challenges that we currently face. We would love to work with mentors and experts to help us fine-tune our business model so that we can achieve both our social and revenue goals. 

• Legal & Financial: We work with an international team and serve clients across many countries, which requires a complicated legal and accounting setup. We have the basics in place to run our online therapy pilot, but we would love to connect with the right legal and accounting experts to help ensure we also have all the right long-term frameworks in place.

• Technical: We don't currently have a technical expert on our team, but our solution does rely on technology, so this is a crucial gap that we’ll need to fill soon. We would love to work with experts to help us create a technical roadmap and possibly even connect us to the right candidate to help us build it.