Scott Healy is CEO of Psych Hub. The Health Tech World Award-winning company’s platform aims to empower the people seeking mental health support, the practitioners delivering it and the organisations supporting them with evidence-based education and resources.
Here, we learn more about the importance of accessible educational resources and the scope of Psych Hub’s mental health mission.
Hi Scott. Can you tell me a bit about your background and what led you to Psych Hub?
I’ve worked with early-stage companies for about 25 years.
My exposure to mental and behavioural health began at a company called Cognito.
Through that, I met the founders of Psych Hub—Marjorie Morrison, a therapist and mental health entrepreneur, and former Congressman Patrick Kennedy.
Patrick’s mental health and addiction journey, along with his legislative work on the Mental Health Parity Act, really inspired me.
I joined Psych Hub about a year and a half ago to help scale the business and expand access to high-quality, evidence-based mental health resources.
There are a couple of strands to what you do, right?
On one hand, you’re helping connect the right patient to the right therapist. And then there’s the education side which is crucially important.
Yes, exactly.
The company began by upskilling mental health professionals. Many clinicians graduate with generalist training, not with expertise in evidence-based treatments for specific conditions.
We created a robust library of training videos, developed with a Scientific Advisory Board of top experts.
Phase two is consumer education. We offer bite-sized videos on platforms like YouTube, which over 30 million people have used to understand their or a loved one’s mental health.
These resources are designed to be easily digestible, whether they’re trying to understand what they themselves are experiencing or looking to support a loved one, this content helps guide them.
But education is only part of the mission. The next step is connecting people to practitioners who follow the most modern, evidence-based practices.
About six months ago, we launched the first version of our behavioural health care navigation marketplace. It’s free for consumers and includes a guided option.
Scott Healy
With input from leading experts in the mental health field, we created a five- to ten-minute guided assessment to help people better understand their well-being: what they may be going through, how severe it is, and what kind of care might be appropriate.
Based on that, they receive personalised recommendations for next steps and provider options.
How important is tackling social media misinformation to your mission?
One interesting thing I’ve learned is that a lot of consumers are finding our content—specifically our consumer-focused videos, not training materials—through platforms like YouTube and Google.
Credit to them: both platforms have teams of mental health professionals who vet content in sensitive areas like healthcare and finance, where misinformation can be harmful.
So when you search for mental health topics like depression, anxiety, or ADHD on YouTube, you’ll often see our videos near the top.
We’re part of a small group of content providers that Google has vetted as reputable, thanks to our trained practitioners and evidence-based approach.
That’s a big reason why we continue investing in this kind of content and in building our brand.
There’s a lot of poor-quality information out there, and we want to be a trusted source.
That’s also why we launched our care navigation platform—so consumers can assess their situation and find reliable support.
Are there specific challenges in reaching communities that don’t typically access these services?
We’ve built different genres of content to align to particular cultural backgrounds, so that the people consuming it can relate to it.
We cater to different needs on the training side, too.
We can help actual trained mental health practitioners go really deep and improve their skills.
But then there are the people whose job isn’t necessarily to treat those people, but are dealing with them throughout the healthcare system.
So that could be non-behavioural or mental health clinicians, like doctors, nurse practitioners or physician’s assistants, who often get very light levels of mental health training.
We also have content that helps upskill those people to be more effective in identifying issues and getting them the right form of expert care.
And then finally, the third group are the non-clinical people in a healthcare setting.
We were recently talking with somebody who was having a problem retaining their frontline intake staff, because they had patients coming into waiting rooms being violent, literally jumping over the intake desk.
We help people understand how to diffuse those situations and be supportive of people going through those sorts of struggles.
In the UK, first contact with mental health support is often through the police.
Is that the same in the US? Presumably the police could benefit from this too.
Yes, it is. Some of our users come from various areas of the prison system.
We’re also seeing increased interest from employers who want to train HR teams and managers to identify and support employees with mental health challenges.
Many people still default to talk therapy, but in some cases, apps, group sessions or intensive outpatient programmes are more appropriate.
Ultimately, we want to increase awareness of this full spectrum of care options.
What’s next for Psych Hub over the next 12 months?
We’ll continue to position ourselves as a mental health ally.
Our role is to present the best care options based on where someone is in their journey, adapting over time as their needs evolve.
If a user isn’t progressing, we can adjust their care path and connect them to better-fitting providers.
We want to continue to build on quality metrics and outcomes feedback to enable us to be smarter about how we make these matches over time.
