Headspace has begun combining mindfulness content and clinical mental health services into a single platform. The end-to-end mental health support offering comes nearly two and a half years after the platform merged with Ginger, an on-demand mental health service.
Enterprise customers who sign up for Headspace’s fully integrated offering can give their employees access to Headspace’s mental health and mindfulness content, one-on-one mental health coaching, therapy, psychiatry and work-life services starting this month.
“What we want to do here is create the brand that people think of when they think about mental health,” Headspace CEO Russell Glass tells Fast Company. “The first thing they do is go to Headspace and start engaging them and letting us help them navigate the mental health system, help them get to the right level of care.”
Blending the two platforms has long been a goal for Headspace, hoping to create a more holistic, integrated service amid the national mental health crisis. A user may be seeking therapy, but clinical evaluation scores indicate they may see improvement from coaching before needing further care.
“We want to help them understand what their needs are because most people don’t know what they really need,” Glass says. “They know they don’t feel well.”
Headspace was one of the technology platforms that grew in popularity in the early days of the epidemic. People were stuck at home for weeks, dealing with an unprecedented global crisis, and the app promised some relief.
But chief product and design officer Leslie Witt says consumers are coming to the platform to find more mental health resources than Headspace can provide.
“In many cases, we didn’t have the tools and resources to connect them to the health care they needed,” says Witt, adding that merging with Ginger made that goal possible. “So we bring all the services together. . . This really presents a fundamental opportunity to deliver on the promise that consumers have already seen in many ways, that by coming into this space I can give you a very brief understanding of who I am, what I need and how I do it. and for us to connect them directly to the right level of care.”