Ask HN: Why don't startups try to disrupt the poor state of mental health?

Anyone interested in fixing mental health or actually all health needs to get a copy of "Black Box Thinking" by Matthew Syed. Any application will fail until the nature of information sharing has changed.

Short version: Mental health is incredibly complicated in terms of diagnosing and treating. A lot of the diseases share similar symptoms and they're still working on figuring out what separates conditions from one another and makes them unique / how to tell them apart. I.E. they moved Aspergers onto the autism spectrum rather than as a standalone condition recently.

Studying and treating mental health ultimately involves putting trained practitioners in a room with patients for a sustained period of time to accurately diagnose them and run studies to better understand their condition and how to treat it. Yes, we have some ways of managing conditions like Bipolar, but the diagnosis process is incredibly complex and very detailed to the point of requiring the treatment provider interact thoroughly with a large group of people to ensure an accurate diagnosis.

Ultimately, you want an extremely low rate of false positive diagnoses with regards to mental health issues and teasing apart the difference between the actual condition and someone exhibiting some symptoms due to other causes requires a lot of training and practice. I don't think much of that translates to the SV/VC model yet.

I can tell you from the innovator side of things behavioral health is producing more interesting start-ups than almost any other part of health tech. The money is slow in coming as the business model / monetization is still unclear - beyond simple out-of-pocket models. I have seen some amazing prototypes in the last few months including a fair number in the big data / predictive analytics space which seek to identify early signs of depression and other MH conditions.

Most have not yet formed into fundable startups but they will and I have seen leaps in terms of iterating around these ideas.