Congrats and A New Path: An Innovative Mental Health Help Solution To The Ghanaian Youth.

So a few days ago, I posted a short snip of the start of our #mentalhealth #bootcamp at HopIn academy that has been keeping me busy recently. This bootcamp has to be the most intensive training I’ve ever been through.

We started with a discussion led by Dr Bill Hill Komsoon, Psychiatrist and HOD at the school of Medicine of University for Development Tamale, on the current Mental Health situation in the world, narrowed it down to Ghana, and further narrowed it down to Tamale, the city we’re in and focusing on.

I learnt and did a lot of things I’ve never done before, entrepreneurship and business pitching being the most significant (and fun). We did several discussions, presentations, empathy trip and surveys to better understand what people (our markets) think about the problem we were looking at solving, to arrive at the final solutions and products we came up with.

The various teams worked on very innovative solutions to solve the Emergence of Mental Health issues in Tamale and to be honest, the creations the teams came up with were mind-blowing for just 5 days of work. Especially for people that have not been pre-exposed to entrepreneurship and pitching, it was impressive the performance and results. I commend everyone.

My Team (Team Calm) realized from our empathy trip and surveys that why most of the youth here don’t seek help with their mental health problems is that for one, they fear the stigma and judgement of other people watching them walk into mental health facilities. So our solution was to design a mobile app ( called Talk Station) that connects people to specialists, to eliminate for individuals with a privacy concern, the need to have to meet specialists in person, and giving them all the privacy they need, as they don’t have to disclose their real identities even on the app.

We’ll also be creating support groups similar to AA groups for the youth to meet and share about the things they’re going through that they’d much rather talk to others about than go see a specialist. Sometimes that is all we need- a listening ear, not a judging or nagging friend who call us names for talking about important things like the state of our mental health.

But most importantly, we’ll be visiting High schools and Universities to give mental health talks and guide then on how to handle issues relating to their mental health.

I’ve struggled with depression before and I know for sure these solutions would’ve been a great help to me if they existed at the time. My team’s solutions actually come from a place of empathy due to not just information or data we collected, but from our own experiences.

I was privileged to be the team leader and my team is really excited to have won the Pitch Deck Competition yesterday. We’re very thankful to HopIn academy for the prize and the opportunity to be part of their next business incubation cohort. We’re looking forward to great mentorship and coaching as the incubation program starts, and we’re hoping that we can make the impact we envision with the Talk Station App and help bring down the surging numbers in #depression and other mental health concerns among the youth.

Any sort of support is welcome if you want to contribute to the team’s goals. We’re an upcoming startup looking to tackle the huge concern of mental health neglect and disregard in Tamale, Ghana and we’ll need all the help we can get!

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