ShareWell wants to boost mental health support with its 10,000 support groups • TechCrunch

Therapists—if you can even get one to take your insurance or new clients—can add more grief to your wallet even as you try to fix your own mental health issues. ShareWell believes that it is an alternative step between special needs forums and online communities, coaching and therapy through its highly scalable peer support model. The company’s thesis is that people in a metaphorical boat can lean on each other to ease the burden of going it alone (but emphatically not advice!).

“I started Sherwell because peer support helped me through the most difficult phase of my life,” said founder and CEO Cece Cheng in an interview with TechCrunch. “During the pandemic, I was in an emotionally abusive relationship. I had a therapist that I worked with and she was very supportive, but I didn’t want to talk about it with my friends when I was in this situation. I felt a lot of shame; Sometimes even well-meaning friends can’t really understand what I’m going through.

Cheng plans to use her own experience to combat isolation to develop a better solution for that, but to create a tool that allows people to support each other using existing methods. She points to other successful peer-based support groups, such as Alcoholics Anonymous.

“I looked online, and I was a little shocked at how much I was getting; I found dead connections, lack of information and frustration,” Cheng said. “Usually, it was just a zoom link where you joined at some point and hoped other people would come along. Sometimes there were three people who appeared; Another time there were 20. It just didn’t feel very safe. I’ve found some reddit forums and facebook groups that I think are so shocking these days, I thought there was no better place.

People need all the help they can get. The epidemic has exacerbated an already serious mental health crisis, leading to a 25 percent increase in depression and anxiety nationwide; And 77 percent of Americans live in counties where access to mental health services is difficult. The company wants to provide an effective, affordable and accessible live human support option.

ShareWell told TechCrunch it has raised $1.3 million in a pre-seed round, which includes investments from Adrian Awn, CEO and co-founder of Forward. Kyle Vogt, CEO and founder of Twitch and Cruise; Russell Simmons, former CTO and co-founder of Yelp; Margo Georgiadis, former CEO of Ancestry.com; Charlie Cheever, former CTO and co-founder of Quora; Rob Hayes, the first investor in Uber; and silent capital.

That’s one hell of an investor lineup, and it speaks to Cheng’s deep roots in Silicon Valley. She was at Firstround Capital and Makers Fund before she left her investor career to start this company.

Personally, I’m hesitant to turn to the Internet for help and advice given the overall quality of information online, but Cheng assures me that the company has thought about security from the ground up.

“We’ve built a video and community platform with our own security features. For video sessions, we have The rule of three, which means that each virtual session requires a host and at least two participants to start the session. Anytime someone drops out and is below three, everyone goes into detention,” Cheng says. “The site bans one-on-one communication anywhere, which in itself limits cases of abuse. We also have sitewide banning; if something makes you uncomfortable, you can ban someone and you’ll never be in a session with them, you won’t see their forum posts. You’re totally banned. Reporting everywhere.” And there are flagging features. We also have a rating feature for hosts and sessions. Bad actors get flagged, banned and reported, and if that happens too often, the team will step in. We shouldn’t have to because the community is self-governing.

The company’s special sauce is how it thinks about peer group system and associated rules. The key is to only share your own experiences rather than giving advice to other people on the call.

“We define peer support as sharing experiences, not advice. That’s the number one most important rule in our community guidelines. We’re here to share experiences and support each other. We can relate to what we’ve learned from our personal or professional experiences, but giving advice, researching, etc. It’s counterintuitive,” Cheng says. However, she says no one from ShareWell is actively monitoring ongoing sessions. “Anyone can create and host a peer support session after participating in a session on the platform. We have a lot of host training materials, and we support hosts.

The company told me that the hosts are not allowed to encourage someone to seek the help of a therapist or other professional when someone is clearly struggling and needs professional help.

“just now [asking someone to seek professional help] It’s frustrating, because this crosses the line of counseling, but if I see someone who I feel needs therapy, maybe I’ll share my own experience of how therapy helped me deal with some things,” Cheng said. “For the future, we think we’ll move people beyond peer support into modalities. We already see people looking for training and therapy, etc., but we see peer support as a starting point for the community, and then connect people to resources outside of ShareWell.”