1· Introduction∘ Who am I?, and why this project?∘ Timeline, role, and constraints

2· Research∘ Objectives∘ Findings

3· The journey of finding a supervisor in India∘ Summarising the journey map

4· Problem Statement

I will give you 2 phrases and I want you to paint a picture in your head

Mental Health

India 2035

Now, I am assuming the vast majority of us are going to paint 2 kinds of picture:

Pessimists will paint a picture where they see a deepened a pervasive mental health epidemic all around them, from being a silent, subtle, and invisible misery of the masses, to a loud and clear message screaming through the sealed mouths of people too depressed to even get out their beds.

Optimists here will paint a picture of a society that has matured, where people are more kind and considerate to one another, where there are more and more people who are working in service of others, a booming rise in the mental health of India.

Who’s going to be right about this prediction?, well, I wish its the later, but we would have to see, however the present dictates a fact that I want you to be aware of:

That is a beautiful number. Careers in psychology are estimated to grow at an average of 14% on year, with increasing awareness and acceptance of mental ailments, the field of psychology is bound to grow.

My intention with this project is therefore to cater to the wishes, needs, and requirements this industry has and contribute it in its fight against the mental health epidemic.

I am the 50%, I am someone who quit engineering and made a switch to psychology in hopes of understanding myself and others around me, and to cater to what people needed in order to feel better and thrive in their lives.

I did my bachelors from SD College, Chandigarh, where for the last 2 years of my undergrad, I was elected to represent and lead the department of psychology and the psychology club. This enabled me to have conversations with students and teachers about the state of affairs of psychology and psychotherapy in India, allowing me to understand its various pain points that need to be addressed, one of my core motivating questions being:

This was a 3 month long project where,

I was responsible for each and every aspect of research and design, that is user interviews, secondary research, competitive analysis, wire-framing, and prototyping.

While also ensuring that my first UX project didn’t suffer

This project is my conceptual understanding of the needs and requirements of therapists, which was also the core target audience of this project.

The research for this project involved reading articles and papers, and talking to multiple people at various points of time.

Have open conversations with therapists and,

Find out about their day to day activities, their needs, desires, and motivations, and most importantly what they find frustrating about their work/about the field.

Dive deeper into their needs and frustrations while also connecting these aspects to the larger picture of psychotherapy in India.

Although I got to know about the various interesting facets of Psychotherapy and how it is practiced in the real world, staying consistent with my core objectives, here is what I found:

Therapists have three needs in particular: fair compensation, opportunity to up skill themselves consistently, and supervision for feedback and improvement of their practice.

A need of certified and experienced supervisors on an individual level, and at a B2B scale as well.

An overview how supervision works in India, and exactly how frustrating it is for therapists and startups to find and retain supervisors for their practice.

Finding mentors and supervisors online is an exhausting process:

Firstly, its hard to determine whether a supervisor even offers the service in the first place or not.

Secondly, reaching out these people is equivalent of send cold-emails, which as we know leads to poor conversions especially on LinkedIn, a glorified service trying to loose its identity as a mere job board.

All this research brings us to the following problem statement

Interestingly enough, there were no competitors in the market for this kind of a service, and that makes sense cause its not a profitable market to address in the first place, but that is not stopping me from building it, after all this is a passion project, and has potential to achieve the first mover advantage.

What this service intends to be is an online space where therapists and supervisors can come together and help each other out. Here you can:

Search for mentors and supervisors by their level of experience, or the specialisation that they cater to.

Interact with mentors to discuss and explore the nooks and crannies of their niches, and

Interact with supervisors and get feedback on the execution of your practice with individual clients.

This is an important question to ask, why solve for a problem that has no validity in the first place?

However the chicken and egg dilemma here is without a large number of MAU, mentors and supervisors won’t be interested to come and on the other hand, without good supervisors and mentors, users won’t come to this service.

This dilemma will eventually be solved by the virtue of future design and marketing, but at the present level, the service has been designed to massage the ego and vanity of supervisors by the exhibition of virtue signals like:

Number of sessions conducted

Feedback and reviews given by mentees

Research contributions made by therapists and supervisors over the span of their careers

In the future the app could even integrate AI services which would allow mentors and supervisors to generate content out of the sessions that they conduct, thereby enhancing their content marketing game.

I wish I could write everything about my process and my learnings, but I have to respect the time and attention of the reader, however if you are interested you can book a discovery call with me and discuss this further anytime.

I don’t want this passion for therapy, for this conversation to end right here and would love to further learn (and/or unlearn) about this space more.

Thank you for your time…