Starting the mental health conversation: A CivTech alumni success story

CEO of Voxsio, Michael McTernan, has turned responding to a CivTech Challenge in 2018 into a personal passion to help as many people as possible to access effective mental health support and treatment. As the company works toward their technology becoming a certified medical device, we spoke to Michael about what Voxsio has been up to since.

Michael McTernan, Ceo, Voxsio

As part of CivTech 3 we were chosen to respond to the Challenge of “Starting the Mental Health Conversation,” and it was focused around mental health of young people championed by a group of young people from Stirling. First of all, the young people who worked on this Challenge as part of the Sponsor team were amazing, it was a lot of fun to work on this with them, and we learned a lot.

From the get-go of creating this new mental health support technology, we prioritised the needs of the young people, letting their needs inform what the technology would do for them. One of our most interesting lessons was that young people often want to work on their mental health in three minutes chunks. Now, if you think about it, lots of the most engaging apps use lots of short engagements, so rather than see this as a negative we approached this as a good thing and focused on designing support for 3 minutes at a time and aim to keep the engagement there.

Now the team at Voxsio are taking the learnings, evidence, and experience of the past few years and we are working towards becoming a medical device, which is in itself an incredible journey. We've got the support of NHS Grampian and we're planning clinical trials. The bar for success is high, we've got to prove that our approach has a positive impact and follow strict criteria on evidence based therapeutics and support for mental health.

For me personally, this has been part of a much broader journey toward helping people. I’ve seen how effective this technology can be, I am convinced that we can change people’s lives for the better, and I am passionate about improving mental health for everyone. So two years ago, I started training to become a counsellor. For the last 18 months I’ve worked in an NHS GP Practice, providing counselling for people, and I love it. For me, it's almost the perfect job I have - running a mental health technology company, which lends itself to my background and my experience, but also giving face to face counselling to people which is such a privilege . I definitely feel like I’ve found my passion.

I've seen so many people, young people and friends, who've struggled with their mental health and I just think there's so much more we can do. Some of what needs done has to be face-to-face, but technology can play a role in making mental health services accessible, available and engaging. So for me it’s so important to lead Voxsio and scale-up support for mental health, so we can actually have a positive impact on everybody’s mental health. All this started with a Challenge from young people through CivTech.

To stay up to date with CivTech news please follow us on Twitter, LinkedIn or join our mailing list.