Anise Health: In Understanding Mental Health, Culture Matters
Today, we talk with Alice Zhang and Nisha Desai, co-founders of Anise Health. Anise is a culturally responsive digital mental health and well-being platform dedicated to meeting the unique needs of communities of color. For now, it’s focused on Asian American folks.
This is our first episode of the 2022 season of the John E. Martin Mental Healthcare Podcast. But more than that, it’s a homecoming of sorts. We first met Alice and Nisha in 2021 when they were business school students competing in the John E. Martin Dental Healthcare Challenge case competition. Today, we find them working on one of the greatest challenges of our day. I hope you’re excited to join us in learning more about their success and what motivated them to embark on this journey.
Episode Quotes:
On grounding philosophies
[4:28] Anise is really centered on this one concept: that culture matters a lot in mental healthcare. And we're incorporating culture and intersectionality into evidence-based treatment. Anise is actually the first digital mental health platform that's dedicated to meeting the needs of the Asian American community.
To start, we offer culturally adapted therapy, coaching, and a self-service tool, which research has shown to be five times more effective than existing one-size-fits-all model. One reason behind that is because modern therapy ignores cultures, despite it playing a critical role in shaping how we experience the world, how we express our emotion, and hence what strategies can effectively resolve our psychological blockers and barriers.
On initial personal experiences with mental health services
[11:11] It didn't work for me because, no matter how long I spent explaining my upbringing and things that I thought were causing me trouble, I don't think it really got through to my therapist, Or, the strategies that he was recommending didn't necessarily work for me. And it wasn't until I found a therapist who approached therapy with culture in mind that I started to understand myself better from the lens of someone who grew up in this culture.
I cycled through several therapists until I found one that worked for me. And I think for a lot of people, when they're just starting out, they have no benchmark comparison. So, we're trying to take that work away from someone who's already in a place of distress to have to go through multiple trials until they can find someone that can understand them.
On why Anise works
[13:09] Unfamiliarity with verbalizing and expressing feelings is something that is often a barrier for many Asian clients to even start therapy. It’s also often a reason for why they drop out of therapy prematurely. They aren't able to see the progress, in the early days, that they're probably hoping for, and it results in mistrust with their provider.
They feel like, ‘if I'm not making progress, like why am I wasting time doing this?’ For the Asian community, where not only is this verbalization that’s an issue, but also: people really want to achieve and they wanna get things done, they wanna be action-oriented. The behavioral coaching integration built into our care model really helps achieve progress quickly.
On dealing with racism
[16:12] There's some things that are institutionalized, some forms of– whether it's racism or oppression– that might have deeper structural roots, that aren't going to change anytime soon.
So perhaps the right approach is accepting a certain situation and learning how to be okay with it in order to move forward.
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