BeMe is an insurance-backed TikTok for psychological well being.

The kids are out of order. Suicide attempts increased by 50% in teenage girls during the pandemic last winter, while up to 54% of teenagers reported having thoughts of suicide in early 2021.

In return, three leading pediatric institutions have declared a national emergency in child and adolescent health. And a startup called BeMe – founded by heads from Harvard, Facebook and the Trevor Project – hopes to be able to help.

BeMe is a teen social media platform that looks a lot like TikTok. Its stated goal is to make young people happier and mentally healthier. But with $ 7 million in seed capital – along with paid partnerships with the top 10 commercial health and Medicaid plans – BeMe is anything but your nonprofit nonprofit. Instead, BeMe is a for-profit company that specifically advertises the insurance industry to modernize ongoing and psychological remote treatment. To do this, BeMe uses smartphones, influencers and all the social media tricks that get people to check an app several times a day.

If you’re skeptical of an app partnering with insurance companies to turn their hats backwards to solve teenage mental health crisis, you’re not the only one. However, BeMe believes that its unique strength lies particularly in its close relationships with the healthcare industry. It even plans to get its first group of users through insurance plan recommendations rather than viral marketing.

“We want to reach out to all teenagers, from the emotionally curious to the psychiatric, those with Medicaid funding to the commercial.” [insurance] Funding for everything in between, ”says CEO Nicki Tessler, a trained psychologist who has held several leadership positions in healthcare. “We wanted to democratize” [mental healthcare] Access to young people. “

[Image: courtesy BeMe]

Tour through BeMe

BeMe won’t start until 2022. And while I couldn’t try the app myself, I was guided by the company’s Chief Product and Technical Officer, Mandeep Dhillon. In his last role, Dhillon was product manager responsible for integrity at Facebook. Like Tessler, he felt called to work on BeMe. Both have teenagers at home.

The first time you log into BeMe, you’ll be asked what brought you to the app – whether it was dealing with your mood, your triggers, or your identity. After that it is generally asked what topics you are interested in, from Twitch to dating. BeMe uses this information to create a profile to customize content across the board. (When asked about its privacy policy, BeMe promised it would exceed the Federal Trade Commission’s (FTC) Online Privacy Protection Rule (COPPA) standards by adopting the UK’s Age Appropriate Design Code (AADC), and it will incorporate all of its guidelines in Plain text for young people.)

Next, users are taken to a home page that contains the Daily Three. These are essentially three tasks – content to read or exercises such as short meditations and journaling that a person can do. “No child wakes up thinking, ‘How can I work on mental health?’” Says Dhillon. “So we try to help them through games and quests.”

Many of these practices can have a direct mental health impact. Like most of the elements in the app, these tasks are not random but based on best practices in clinical psychology. (MIT researchers have shown that short, app-based tasks can help improve mental health.) “Part of what we’re trying to do is leverage the science we know and deliberately curate and create content behind it “Said Neha Chaudhary, a practicing child psychiatrist, faculty member at Harvard Medical School and Chief Medical Officer of BeMe. “We try to draw from what we know in clinical practice and offer these interventions in the form of an activity that encourages you to go through a mindfulness exercise or a deep breathing exercise when you are experiencing intense emotions.”

There is a mood slider on the same side. It asks how happy you are today and you draw a smiley face from left to right depending on your answer. BeMe plans to log this data over time so users can see correlations in their behavior (maybe it’s always a bad mood on Mondays, or journaling is always stressful). In the long term, the data from this simple mood regulator will enable BeMe to validate its own platform and test whether its own methods actually work.

[Image: courtesy BeMe]

Content maintenance

And of course, BeMe wouldn’t be a modern day social media startup without a solid, unabashed clone of the TikTok feed. Unlike TikTok, which allows anyone to post almost anything, BeMe’s feed is also anchored in proven content. Popular influencers can come from platforms like TikTok, but BeMe can only post company-verified mental health news (a fact-checking plan that companies like Snapchat have put in place in the past) – and BeMe users can’t post anything publicly their own. These points are important because unqualified mental health influencers on TikTok appear to have sparked mass hysteria in Generation Z, while young people experience specific, unprecedented tics that stem from social suggestion.

Even the lighter content of BeMe will only be approved for the service if there is a tangible mental health benefit. “When we show you puppy videos, there’s a science behind how and why puppy videos and animal interactions can scientifically improve your mood,” says Chaudhary.

For teens who want more instant and personalized help, the app has a coaching space, which is basically a text messaging service that connects a teen with a trained adult who can help them talk or go through a tense moment Referring him to resources that can help him. It seems difficult for BeMe to balance the staffing levels for this service, but Chaudhary points out that these coaches are not psychologists, which should make it easier to procure.

This coaching is neither a therapy session nor a formal telemedicine appointment. “Coaching is something that you can use for five minutes or 15 minutes. You can use it asynchronously or synchronously, ”says Tessler, noting that it’s about helping teenagers with the kind of instant gratification we all expect in the digital age. “Young people won’t [wait until] 4 pm next week for support. “

As for the bigger issues, the issues that require ongoing therapy, BeMe will have built-in referral services to connect teenagers to professional help – which is likely to be covered to some extent by their insurance.

What could go wrong?

This specific model of mild mental health adjustments, coupled with clinical referrals, is why 10 (as-yet-unnamed) insurance companies have expressed an interest in BeMe. You can think of BeMe in a similar way to a gym grant. Insurers will reimburse you in order to keep your body in better shape as it may keep you away from the emergency room or some medication, which will save insurers money in the long run. BeMe makes money by asking insurance companies to offer its tool to policyholders.

However, the exact business model behind BeMe is still in flux. Will BeMe always prioritize teen health over revenue even when the company gets into a difficult time? And how much does your personal insurance pay for BeMe? Could some of your teen’s coaching messages suddenly count towards your own annual spending limits? And something that you tap or reveal in the app can never later count as a pre-existing condition. . . to the right?

These questions sound paranoid. But society has been disenfranchised by both insurers and social media companies. And as I told Dhillon, when you mix these two incredibly powerful, dangerously opaque industries, you’re basically playing with plutonium – an intoxicatingly powerful substance that could be used for either great harm or great virtue.

“We’re playing with the plutonium,” agrees Dhillon, “because it’s there.”

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