Akin Looks to Disrupt SMI Care with Family-First Approach

Akin Mental Health Inc. plans to offer family psychoeducation to the masses.

Founded in 2021 by Stephanie Greer and Matthew Montañez, the company provides support to families with members who are coping with a serious mental illness (SMI). And as far as they can tell, it is the lone digital mental health company adopting family psychoeducation.

Despite positive research reaching back to the 1980s, Greer told BHB in an interview that the treatment never got scaled up because of the stigma around mental health.

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“A lot of it is that our culture and expectations around mental health and mental illness,” Greer, who is also CEO of Akin, said. “We label this as a very individual problem and expect [people] to actually even keep mental health and mental illness secret and hidden from others when we know that that’s really not conducive to health and recovery and positive outcomes for patients.”

Akin Mental Health is based in San Francisco. The company started offering sessions in March.

Akin Mental Health is a pre-seed stage venture-backed company. It plans to raise seed funding in the fall. So far, it has received funding from Precursor Ventures, Berkeley SkyDeck and Andy Dunn, the founding CEO of Bonobos, and several other angel investors.

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Family psychoeducation is the practice of educating family members about SMIs and how to support SMI patients.

Presently, family psychoeducation is mostly within the purview of ancillary services provided by nonprofits such as Grandview, Michigan-based operator Pine Rest Christian Mental Health Services and the National Alliance on Mental Illness’s program Family-to-Family.

For Montañez and Greer, the company’s mission is deeply personal. Both watched as immediate family members coped with an SMI and witnessed a gap in the behavioral health market for people with SMIs. For Greer, it was her mother with bipolar disorder. For Montañez, it was his older brother and schizophrenia. 

“I was doing a lot of research in the space trying to figure out what I can build using my tech skills to help families,” Montañez, who is also Akin’s chief technology officer, said. “I found what we all found: There’s a lot for the more general disorders and nothing really for anything like schizophrenia.”

They said they realized that they and their family members weren’t alone. A national study finds that about 14.2 million American adults (5.6%) have an SMI.

Akin Mental Health operates on a subscription model. It costs $79 per month. It offers a digital health platform with evidence-informed lessons, personal guidance and community to support families through its Akin Family Circles.

The circles assemble small groups of six to 10 members that support someone with an SMI. However, Akin Mental Health’s approach is to provide sessions to supporting family members and patients in separate sessions, Greer said.

Family psychoeducation differs from therapy in that it doesn’t seek to apply a clinical intervention. Even if the person with the SMI is involved, family psychoeducation seeks to educate and provide support, Greer said.

As an all-digital operator, Greer and Montañez act as the “guides” for the weekly sessions. Akin Mental Health’s core team also includes Kacey Ballard, product design lead, and Charlie Davidson, clinical development lead.

Award-winning clinical research psychologist ​​Shirley Glynn acts as the company’s scientific advisor.

Akin Mental Health aims to stop what could turn into a life-long cycle of breakdowns, hospitalizations and turmoil at the onset of an SMI with family psychoeducation.

One review finds that family psychoeducation reduces the rate of hospitalization for symptom relapse by between 20% and 50%. Even without the support of a group, single-family interventions saw a 49% reduction in readmissions, per one UK-based study.

Some data suggest that family psychoeducation reduces the likelihood of premature death by 90% when family members get involved at the outset of an SMI. People with SMIs typically live 10 to 20 years less than average.

Greer and Montañez eventually hope to see Akin Mental Health get connected with payers, many of whom are making greater investments into behavioral health. Specifically, they hope the company is seen as a resource to bend the cost curve around SMI.

“We see this as very relevant and potentially more relevant to value-based care models where you’re really trying to take a look at the whole patient,” Greer said. “We’re thinking about the patient holistically and about the family support system that’s going to have to be an influence on that person’s trajectory for recovery and for [their] wellness.”

People over the age of 65 with SMI, on average, incur about 11x more mental health services spending and 37% higher medical spending than those with no known mental illness.

More generally, a Milliman study of 21 million insured lives finds that people with SMI see 6.3x more overall health care costs and 4.2x more hospital costs than people without known behavioral health conditions.

In the aggregate, people with SMI made up 0.9% of the studied population and accounted for 3.3% of all health costs. The study said that people with SMIs represented a “relatively small portion of both the population and of total healthcare costs.”

However, people with SMI are the largest consumers of behavioral health services, accounting for 33% of average annual spending while making up 3% of the population of those with any behavioral health condition including substance-use disorders.

“The research demonstrates when the family is educated and better prepared to support their loved one, it leads to meaningful outcomes,” Montañez said. “It’s a matter for us of figuring out what the right way is to engage with payers because there’s clearly an incentive there if we can reduce the really significant hospitalization costs for them.”

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