Reinventing mental health
Reinventing mental health
A modern spin in Thales' famous quote: "healthy mind in healthy body"
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🧘 Reinventing mental health
“Healthy mind in healthy body.”
I always loved this quote.
Attributed to the pre-Socratic Greek philosopher Thales, it exemplifies the concepts of balance (“isorropia”), symmetry (“symmetria”) and prudence (“sophrosyne”).
Since the Ancient Greek times, I think we somehow forgot the importance of it.
Historically, taking care of our bodies has been more easily understood than taking care of our minds, even though both require our constant nurturing.
But our minds are equally important to our bodies. And we need to take care of them.
In recent years, there has been a wave of new technology tending to mental health.
Today, let’s look at some of these companies created by Greeks around the world.
Mental health destigmatized
One of the most important changes that the COVID era brought about was the de-stigmatization of mental health issues around the world.
Staying indoors for months on end with limited human contact brought to the surface existing unaddressed mental health issues and created new ones for many of us.
This was especially the case for a predominantly social culture like Greece’s.
As a result, many Greeks flocked to therapy and counseling, including those that traditionally were more hesitant or felt “they did not need it” before.
The concurrent rise of digital methods for people to connect with therapists and democratize access to such services is not a coincidence.
Today, there are many digital platforms offering therapy sessions.
Here are some of the top platforms for finding a therapist in Greece today:
Finding the right therapist is often hard and might take time.
But with these platforms, access to a range of top practitioners has become easier than ever, even if you live in a far off village or secluded island.
New ways of deciphering our mental health
There are also some very cool Greek-founded startups building exciting technology in the digital health space.
Let’s have a look.
thymia
thymia uses AI to make mental health visible.
The company has developed digital mental health biomarkers combining voice, video and behavioral data to understand core symptoms and mental wellbeing indicators.
They currently have two products:
Helios, which provides a wellness range for mental wellness indicators (mental strain, burnout, stress, distress, tiredness, confidence).
Apollo, which offers a clinical range for more medical insights (major depression, generalised anxiety, ADHD and their core symptoms).
thymia has raised at least €3.1 million in funding to date.
LANGaware
LANGaware is AI-based disease detection platform for mental and cognitive health.
Using speech analysis and voice/speech biomarkers, it promises early and objective detection of Mild cognitive impairment (MCI), Alzheimer’s disease (AD) and Depression.
They have also secured a patent in the US since 2021 for their multilingual system that can detect early neurodegenerative and psychiatric disorders.
LANGaware has raised more than €2 million in total funding.
Feel Therapeutics
Feel Therapeutics is a digital precision medicine company focusing on mental health.
They have created the Feel Data Monitoring Device — a wristband with integrated biosensors — that continuously collects data and passive measurements from people.
Feel Therapeutics also claims to have created the world's first emotion sensor and mental health advisor, which quantifies a person’s emotional state in real time.
The company has a number of patents and has raised $13M to date.
Moments
Moments is a note-taking tool for therapists.
It captures therapy sessions and dictations by practitioners and then automatically writes progress notes for each patient.
The team at Moments believes deeply in the power of personal reflection and therapy to help people live better lives.
With more and more people starting therapy around the world, creating tools that can enable practitioners to do their job better is not just a nicety, but a necessity.
Training our minds from an early age
Our mental health is not just defined by a feeling at a single moment in time.
It is also the result of the content that we feed our brains, the types of activities that we do and the behaviors that we cultivate.
And no period is more important for planting the right seeds than our childhood.
Even there, Greeks are leading some very interesting companies building the soft skills and cultivating the types of behaviors that can lead to more fulfilling lives.
NXTLVL
NXTLVL builds online interactive mini missions for kids.
Led by an AI assistant coach, their gaming platform trains children for the timeless skills to thrive in school, work, and life.
While NXTLVL mainly focuses on cultivating problem-solving abilities, it also teaches kids how to collaborate, identify emotions and express themselves more clearly.
NXTLVL has raised more than $0.8 million in funding.
Morphoses
Morphoses has created a soft-skill development platform for young learners.
It offers solutions for parents, businesses and schools eager to help create happier, more well-rounded and better-developed children.
For Morphoses, building a community that works towards strengthening children's mental health is a key measure of their success.
Morphoses has raised at least €2.1 million in funding.
Investing in mental health
Did you know that there is even a Greek-founded VC focusing entirely on mental health technology? That’s right.
Evio VC is an early stage venture capital firm investing in startups that empower people to become their best versions of their selves.
There are also many angels that are very active in the domain.
Postscript
I am personally very excited about this new trend of taking our mental health more seriously and also creating better tools to serve it.
It’s great to see Greek founders leading the charge in this area.
🏭 Economy & Business
Inflation in Greece remains at least 1% higher than EU average
Full employment could be reached in 3.5 years, *if* progress persists
Household borrowing as % of GDP in continuous decline since crisis
GDP per capita has been improving in recent years
Local feta market reaches €244M, with no signs of easing
Nuclear energy program — is Greece ready for such a discussion?
Medium-term fiscal-structural plan for 2025-2028 is finally out
🤖 Tech & Startups
Ithaca (crypto infra tooling) raised $20M from Paradigm
BLI (biofabrication) secured a $1.8M pre-seed round
ReNeuroCell (cell therapy) officially spun-out off FORTH and UoC
Phylax Systems (crypto security) is officially out of stealth mode
35 active funds will be investing in Greek startups next year
Venture Banking unit created by Eurobank
Tech hubs from large multinationals are multiplying across Greece
Greek AI supercomputer Daedalus to be ready by Fall 2025
🙌 Celebrating Greek wins
Panos Galanos won the prestigious Lundbeck Foundation Fellowship 2024
Yannis Kargiotakis wins Gold in European Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu championship
Kornilios Michailidis came 1st in the 2024 Tokyo International Conducting Competition
📌 Spotlight: What’s the level of economic freedom in Greece?
Let’s look at the Fraser Institute’s measure of economic freedom.
There is the static view: Greece ranks last in the EU.
There is also the dynamic view: while in a consistent downward slope since the early 2000s, Greece had in 2022 (latest year of data) its best comparative ranking in 8 years.
The reality is hence mixed: Greece is not really improving today on an individual level, but the wider and quicker deterioration of the world’s state of economic freedom finds it doing better compared to other states.
In the past, I would look at the Heritage Foundation’s Index of Economic Freedom to get a sense of Greece’s progress. Unfortunately, in recent years it seems that the underlying methodology has problems, as the two main sub-components impacting the fiscal health metric do not seem to correspond to the actual data. Until fixed, I will no longer use it.
That’s it for this week. I always love hearing from you. Make sure to hit that reply button.
Until next time!
I would not trust Heritage Foundation for anything. Of course, they are the architects of Project 2025. It's ironic that the Heritage Foundation mentions freedom, when Project 2025 is about as anti-freedom as you can get.