Research has established that the prevalence of mental health conditions among LGBTQIA+ people is higher. Mid-Day Online spoke with the creator of a mobile app that aims to make mental health resources inclusive and accessible
Each year, June is observed as Pride Month to celebrate the LGBTQIA+ community around the world. Representative image. Photo/iStock
Developed in 2020, Evolve is a health app that helps users improve their mental well-being through interactive content based on Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT). The Indian app, with over 200,000 users, has a strong focus on LGBTQIA+ people Due to its curated content that specifically caters to members of the community, Evolve is one of the featured apps on Google Play to celebrate Pride Month in India. Mid-Day Online spoke with Anshul Kamath, co-founder of Evolve, to understand how apps can pave the way to inclusive health resources.
How critical is it for the LGBTQIA+ community to access mental health resources?
Numerous research studies have shown that any minority or marginalized group, including members of the LGBTQIA+ community, are more likely to experience poorer mental health. Therefore, it is extremely important that members of the community have access to effective mental health solutions. And yet, it is a very underserved segment in the mental health market.
There is a need for more tailored solutions for the community. However, there is a huge gap between the mental health needs of community members and the availability of solutions. For example, even when it comes to therapists, many of them are not trained to understand the problems faced by people in the community. The number of affirmative queer therapists, with whom people can feel safe and open up to them, is extremely low. In the same way, when it comes to digital mental health platforms and applications, most solutions are heteronormative and do not meet the more subtle needs of the community.
How important was it to you to make Evolve inclusive?
My co-founder Rohan Arora and I started Evolve in 2020 as a mental health app for everyone. However, over time, we realized that members of certain groups, such as the LGBTQIA+ community, had very different needs. To be truly effective, we needed to be more inclusive in our approach. Although Evolve is an early-stage startup, diversity and inclusion are a huge part of our DNA. Our core team has members of different gender identities, sexualities, and religions. During Pride Month last year (June 2021), we ran some experiments on the Google Play Console to test a more inclusive logo and branding. We noticed a huge increase in our conversion rates and this trend continued even after Pride Month, which helped us realize that members of the community were naturally leaning towards our app.
Also read: Pride Month: How Apps Can Provide Safe Virtual Spaces for the LGBTQIA+ Community
Today we are possibly the only global mental health app that is LGBTQIA+ first and this is extremely important to us because while there are hundreds of apps for everyone, there is a huge shortage of solutions for the community. At Evolve, we offer curated content specifically for them, including interactive insights on ‘coming to terms with your sexuality’ and ‘coming out to your loved ones’.
What is your process for creating queer-specific features?
At a basic level, we’ve spent a lot of time on our UI/UX to make sure our app is queer-affirmative and can give users a safe space where they can be vulnerable and comfortable expressing their thoughts and feelings, without any judgment. We have done this by spending time with our queer-affirmative clients and therapists to understand the preferred choice of language and words.
Every time we release new content or a feature on our platform, we first try to understand how an expert or community members solve that problem offline. For example, if we’re releasing content about dealing with homophobia in the home, we talk to multiple users who have experienced this and understand what they’ve been through, to truly empathize with their pain points.
We also spoke with queer-affirmative therapists to understand how they help clients in this situation, from the kinds of questions they ask, the choice of words, and the techniques they use. We combine these insights with our own proprietary UI/UX, allowing us to translate much of this learning into our virtual content. We have an extremely loyal set of users who often come forward and ask us to involve them in whatever new thing we’re building. Therefore, we use them as a beta testing group and take your feedback before we release the content or feature to all of our users.
Additionally, Google Play has played a huge role in our growth story so far by actively recognizing and promoting us to potential users. We have access to a world-class Developer Console where we can constantly run A|B test experiments and gain insights into our audiences. That has helped us understand our users faster and create a better product for them.
In what different ways does the queer talent on board contribute to the process of creating resources for the community?
Love and empathy have always been key ingredients in our product since day 1. I firmly believe that you cannot create a successful product for someone without having true empathy for their needs. And from that perspective, having community members on our core team has been essential for us to make this pivot. In fact, our love for users and ratings on the Google Play Store have increased after our pivot to an LGBTQIA+ first app.
Also read: Sushant Divgikr talks about discrimination and prejudice faced by artists in the LGBTQIA+ community
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How can mental health resources be made interactive rather than a “one size fits all” approach to benefit people across the spectrum of gender and sexuality?
When we started Evolve, most mental health apps had meditations or similar content that was “one-way.” For users, this usually meant plugging in their headphones and consuming something. However, we have always been inspired by the way good therapists, coaches, and others conduct in-person sessions. I also had personal experience facilitating wellness workshops for thousands of people before starting Evolve. In all these sessions, the communication was never one-way. A good therapist or coach is a mere facilitator in the process, finally, the person or the client always has the answers, it is up to the expert to provide them with the right environment, space and structure to help them process their thoughts. This process is called “waiting” and has been a big part of the user experience we provide to our users at Evolve. Our sessions are interactive and allow users to explore and process their thoughts. We ask them the right questions an expert would ask and explain the frameworks through audio or video. Some of our sessions also have custom flows based on user input or selection. So if there are 10 people doing the same session on Evolve, all 10 will come out with very different conclusions and reflections.
Are the instructions and activities supported by evidence-based psychotherapy practices?
We adopt various psychotherapy techniques and integrate them into the product as and where needed. The “Explore Your Identity” trip you’re referring to is one of the first trips our users choose to take. Most users who would do this are still in the questioning phase where they are trying to understand their gender identity or sexual orientation. The most important thing for us was to provide an experience where users can safely explore themselves through a combination of being asked the right questions and absorbing information easily. Here we have focused on adopting the technique of holding space for our clients that every good therapist will use, that is, non-judgment and creating a safe space to provide psychological safety as well as subtle positive reinforcement and self-acceptance.
In some of the other journeys we have for the community, like coming out to loved ones, we incorporate dialectical behavior therapy, where we focus a lot on self-acceptance and mindfulness-based techniques.
Also read: The macro impact of microaggressions experienced by LGBTQIA+ people
What were the challenges you faced in developing Evolve’s queer affirmative sessions?
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- When we decided to become a first LGBTQIA+ app in January 2022, it was a big decision and we knew we had a big learning curve ahead of us. We had to go back to the drawing board to create new user personas and start to understand the mental health needs of the community, which are actually very different from the needs we were previously solving. For example, we are currently working on creating sessions for people who identify as asexual and are developing them with two of our users: one from the Philippines and one from the US.
LGBTQIA+ people share sensitive information on the app. How secure is your data?
Some of the benefits that our users love are the fact that they don’t have to open up to another human being and there is no possibility of being judged in any way. Everything in our app is based on creating a safe space for our users. That’s our core value proposition, particularly for community members who often don’t have anyone in their lives to whom they can safely open up. We respect any data that users enter into our app. Data is stored securely on our servers and is not used for any purpose except if users choose to review their thoughts on the app. Users can also choose to delete their account and in our next release we will make this feature even more prominent; With the click of a button, a user can choose to delete all personally identifiable data that they may have shared with us.
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