There's a mental health crisis but we struggle to define what it means.

I first met Brandon Goode nearly a decade ago in New York City. He immediately impressed me with his comfort in chatting about everything from sports to science. At the time, he was working at a pharma industry data firm and was poised to do a stint in Copenhagen at a well-known drug company. After returning back to his native Toronto, he founded his own company, Outro Health, which uses technology to help wean patients off antidepressants. Before all this, Brandon was a soccer player in the US and the UK. Here's Brandon in his own words:

My dad taught me how to go after what you want, and get it by going the extra mile.

My mom taught me that I don’t need to be wildly successful to be happy and be loved (still working on that).

Canadians could use a little less complacency – there seems to be a tendency to offload decisions to government and/or corporations.

Danes could use… well, actually, they’ve pretty much got it covered. Maybe a little more sun?

Americans could use a little more critical thinking. Definitely a land of ingenuity but, culturally, they tend to be swayed by a good speaker with fancy credentials, and forget to dig a little deeper to find the truth for themselves.

Most people aren’t too complicated. I’ve recently been trying to understand human behavior through the lens of (almost) everyone wanting to be accepted by their peers, whether that’s children in the playground, investors in the VC world, or doctors in a healthcare system.

Big pharma. No comment. Ok small comment: not in the business of improving health. They definitely make some medications that are truly life-changing and life-saving but, as they are by nature in the business of making money (as all business fundamentally are), there needs to be checks and balances to ensuring that they haven’t become too powerful–the result being manipulation rather than innovation.

Small pharma should be commended. There should be some interesting advances in drug discovery via AI that lead to dramatically lower costs for developing much more innovative treatments.

Molecules are overrated in a lot of contexts. Biochemical explanations of chronic diseases – arguably the most lucrative disease area – are more often than not red herrings for bigger societal issues like income disparities, ubiquitously unhealthy food systems, unhealthy work environments, and addictive technologies.

Getting off meds is one of the next important waves of healthcare. Many medications weren’t meant to be taken for extended periods of time – and this long-term use can ironically worsen health – but getting people off them was like Blockbuster getting rid of late fees. We’re trying to change that with Outro Health.

I need help finding balance at some point. I get quite obsessed with whatever I’m interested in, but have more recently invested heavily in relationships outside of my work.

I have no trouble making plans A, B, C…Z. I tend to like updating my mental models regularly based on new information. Works well for startups, and made me feel constricted in corporate.

What we don’t understand is the “we”.

Soccer is the world’s game. I loved how, in whatever countries or continents I would move to, I could find a pickup game and make friends through a sport so universally loved.

Meditation apps make me get in a rhythm. I’ve been using Open for mainly yoga and breathwork and it’s great. I tend to do seated meditations on my own.

The age of online dating is magnifying evolutionary psychology, probably not in a good way. Scott Galloway talks about this a lot. If not developed and used intentionally, technology can magnify inequality in most aspects of life.

I take long walks on the lake and think about how I can stay productive while still exercising my curiosity. I find the latter more fun, and sometimes the two feel mutually exclusive. It’s an ongoing balancing act I guess.

Hear me out The mental health crisis is definitely real but probably poorly defined. “Mental health” makes for a great headline, but there’s a lot of nuance. Is it a crisis of meaning? Crisis of addictive technology? Crisis of disconnection? Crisis of basic life needs being substituted for cheap, marketable products? Probably all of the above.

When we’re building technology to “solve” the mental health crisis, what problem are we solving? Antidepressants are a scalable technology – what were they built to solve for? Depression? Suffering? Can we actually solve for suffering? Is suffering a problem, or is our problem that we have a problem with it?

If we don’t ask the right questions, our proposed solutions may take us even further away from a real answer.

You can follow me here on LinkedIn, here on Instagram and check out my company here.