Sara Sheehan’s guest in this episode is Jeremy Fischbach, CEO of Happy, a mental health company providing frictionless, non-clinical support for people in demanding environments. Happy supports large organizations like hospitals and the Department of Defense and operates by eliminating barriers to accessing emotional support. Jeremy drew on his background in psychology and law, as well as his personal difficulties accessing mental health support, to develop Happy. He tells Sara exactly how his innovative approach prioritizes accessibility and impact.
Jeremy’s personal struggles and dissatisfaction with the time-consuming and inaccessible nature of mental health support led him to envision a system where emotional support was readily available and proactively offered. He focused on creating a frictionless system with a platform where users find emotional support without facing complicated processes. Sara explores how Happy’s model addresses a growing need among people who feel disconnected from support.
Sara and Jeremy discuss Happy’s high adoption rates and clinical-level effectiveness, the real-time emotional support offered, and how it enhances employee engagement. Despite struggles with disrupting traditional and digital mental health systems, Jeremy highlights the importance of continuing to challenge old models and assumptions. Happy’s success highlights the need for compassionate, accessible, and innovative mental health solutions that make user experience the priority.
About Jeremy Fischbach:
Jeremy Fischbach is the Founder of Happy, whose mission is to create a more supportive culture by expanding access to the essential ingredient of mental health and by teaching and inspiring people to better emotionally support each other. Prior to Happy, Jeremy was the CEO of Myne, which built interactive educational and sports analytics software that leveraged users’ psychographic data to improve performance. Jeremy has a psychology degree from Princeton and a J.D. from NYU.
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Contact Sara Sheehan | Sara Sheehan Consulting:
Jeremy Fischbach | Happy
- Website: FrictionlessMentalHealth.com
- Jeremy Fischbach on LinkedIn
- Email Jeremy
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Transcript
Sara Sheehan: [00:00:02] Hi there, I’m Sara Sheehan and welcome to my podcast, Transformational Thinkers with Sara Sheehan. Today I’m joined by Jeremy Fischbach, CEO of Happy, a frictionless mental health company that is completely disrupting how large organizations care for their employee’s mental health. Many of the large organizations that are working with Happy have employees that are in harm’s way or in very demanding professions like military organizations such as the Air Force or the Department of Defense, large hospitals with health care workers including nurses and doctors, just to name a few. By the way, their clients are reaping huge returns on investment. Jeremy is the founder and CEO of Happy, whose mission is to create a more supportive culture by expanding access to the essential ingredient of mental health, and by teaching and inspiring people to better emotionally support each other. Prior to Happy, Jeremy was a CEO of Myne, which built interactive educational and sports analytics software that leveraged users psychographic data to improve performance. Jeremy has a psychology degree from Princeton and a JD from NYU.
Jeremy Fischbach: [00:01:39] I’m honored to be here, Sara. Thank you for making time on a Saturday.
Sara Sheehan: [00:01:44] Absolutely. Jeremy, I find you to be a truly fascinating person. Can you tell me a little bit about your backstory and how it led you to where you are?
Jeremy Fischbach: [00:01:57] I’m not sure that I agree with your characterization, but I think I’ve taken the same type of circuitous path that a lot of people have to wherever they are in their lives today. I think for these purposes, my story begins with a deep curiosity about people which preceded going to college. I just happened to always be on the outside of any population I was a part of looking in, and I think it gave me a chance to better understand who I was, who other people were. When I got to Princeton, I majored in psychology and neuroscience and was actually going to be a psychiatrist. I was pre-med and then had a near-death experience right before graduation that sent me on a whole different course. I was a composer in New York City for many years. Then for reasons no different than a lot of lawyers, just went to law school because I didn’t know what else to do. Briefly practiced, hated it, and have been in psych tech and now mental health for the last decade, including the last 4 or 5 years with Happy.
Sara Sheehan: [00:03:25] That is a truly fascinating path that you’ve taken. I’d love to double click on some of the personal trials and tribulations that you’ve had in another conversation. Tell me a little bit about the story that led you to create your business.
Jeremy Fischbach: [00:03:47] It’s a story that I think a lot of people can relate to. It’s really a story about a failure to get mental health support at a critical time in life. I was coming out of a divorce, I needed support, I knew there were-and really, when I say support, I mean mental health support, emotional support, interpersonal support as opposed to other types of support sometimes people need coming out of a divorce, like financial resources. I needed interpersonal support, emotional support, etc. and I knew there were two places to get it. My primary support system, i.e. family and friends, where we get 99% of the mental health support we ever get in life, and secondary support systems like therapy. Happy, this company, the movement around it, was born out of the failure of both of these systems in rapid succession. Sara, you and I have talked about this sequence of events, but my primary support system failed first. Unfortunately, I’m sure a lot of people can resonate with that experience. That looked like me feeling really down, lonely, worried and nine out of ten calls I made to family and friends went right to voicemail. If they actually picked up the phone they had, typically, nothing more supportive to say than ‘I told you not to marry that woman’. My situation got worse. I started chain smoking kind of out of nowhere, was having not suicidal thoughts, but cousins of them. Like, who cares if I die of lung cancer? Which was one of the darker thoughts I had, and I really meant that. I didn’t actually know who would care.
Jeremy Fischbach: [00:05:49] At some point I said, okay, this has gotten serious enough that I should try therapy, and that failed for the reason that I would call friction. Namely, it was too hard to get it. I had to be struggling, obviously, I had to be aware of it, which most people are not. They’re not even aware they’re struggling because we don’t bleed when we’re anxious. The signs that I were struggling were conspicuous, like waking up for the first time in my life and needing a cigarette. I needed to reach a breaking point, which I did. Then I had to research my benefits, send out two dozen emails to therapists. A month and a half later, one of them responded, maybe a few eventually responded. Most responded to say, no, not taking anyone, not in your network. Something I didn’t really want to hear or, you have to pay for this yourself. Eventually, I got to somebody who was taking new patients. Their first opening was a month later, and I had to go through opt ins and registrations and probably two and a half to three months after I began that process, I was sitting in a therapist’s office and she was good.
Jeremy Fischbach: [00:07:13] I think mostly she gave me emotional support. She just listened to me and gave me a little bit of compassion. But mostly, all she said that I remember was just, ‘I’m sorry, Mr. Fischbach, your time’s up’. I just thought, is this what I waited three, four months for? Because this is really just emotional support. It feels like something I should have been able to get much sooner. It led me to the sequence of questions that really lays the groundwork for Happy. The first question was, is there a single person on earth who thinks that what I just went through is their dream version of mental health? I wasn’t being facetious, I really was trying to figure out, is this system, this gauntlet I’ve been navigating in place because people want it that way? Or is it just ‘exist’? I really was trying to figure out, is there a single human being on the planet who, when you ask them, wave a wand and create your mental health solution from scratch, would have named anything that I had just experienced, particularly the experience with therapy. I thought there may literally not be one person who would say that the most common experience that we have today in America for mental health is their dream version of it.
Jeremy Fischbach: [00:08:45] I thought at the time that was quite interesting, given that there were so many other areas of life where I think the solutions on the market really match up with people’s dream version of it. I don’t think most people can imagine an easier version of getting rides places than Uber. I don’t think most people can imagine a better system for delivering goods to our house than Amazon. As much as we sometimes complain about these services, they’ve really created frictionless experiences that are, at this stage I think, hard to beat. The next question I asked was, what is the dream version of mental health? I couldn’t answer for anybody else, but for myself, the answer was simple. I want my friends and family to check in on me more, and when I had to acknowledge that was unlikely to happen, the next question I asked myself was, what would be the next best option? Again, for me, the answer was simple. It was somebody ‘like’ my friends and family checking in on me, and I was imagining my phone ringing and a call that I had absolutely nothing to do to initiate. On the other end was a really caring person just calling to hear my story, to hang on every word, to offer me comfort and really dive into all the pain I was experiencing at the time, but also delve into my dreams. Not the dreams I have when I’m sleeping, but the ones I have when I’m awake and to help me achieve them.
Jeremy Fischbach: [00:10:32] It was pretty clear to me at the time that that was never going to happen. It was a little heartbreaking to realize that, or to believe that. Then I started to wonder why that would never happen. Because for something to be impossible, it has to be novel. I couldn’t think of anything novel about that, Sara. Just somebody, a caring person calling me. Why is that so novel? Kindness, not new. Emotional support, thankfully rare, but not new. The only thing I could think of was that it was frictionless. That was the single element of that experience that was novel, was that I was getting that support without having to take a single step. Then I started to wonder, is making something frictionless enough? Is that such a big deal that I’d want to leave everything else I was doing at the time and start a company around it.
Jeremy Fischbach: [00:11:48] Then back to the connections earlier to companies like Uber and Amazon. I realized, Uber, you can say the same thing. Taxis are not at all innovative, all they did was make taxis frictionless. Amazon doesn’t sell innovative goods, all they did was make buying frictionless. I thought, isn’t making mental health frictionless at least as important as making e-commerce and taxis and all the other things in our life that have become frictionless. And yet, as I looked at the market, I just didn’t see any frictionless mental health solutions. The most frictionless services I could find still required people, like the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline or Warm Lines, now, still require people to be struggling and be aware of it and reach a breaking point and research what resources are there and typically do the hardest thing of all, which is to actually reach out for support. So I took this idea, just to wrap this up, to the Princeton psych department. It was a large group of people orbiting around it that were interested in this same question. Long story short, we ended up having all agreed that there was something there to this idea of frictionless mental health. We ended up piloting early versions of this. The most significant thing we did was survey hundreds and then thousands of people and asked them the same questions that I was asking myself and we were asking ourselves.
Jeremy Fischbach: [00:13:25] Namely, if we could wave a wand, what mental health solution would we create? Across the board, not unanimously but overwhelmingly, we heard people say, Sara, I want my friends and family to check in on me, they’re not going to. In the absence of that, I would like somebody ‘like’ my friends and family checking in on me. They were describing the same experience that I wanted. A proactive, non-clinical type of support which makes complete sense, that people would want support that came to them, as opposed to support that required them to take a lot of time and energy to access it. They wanted something non-clinical, which also makes sense when people are struggling. I’ve yet to hear a person struggling, and I’ve encountered thousands, who say when they’re really down, I would just love to spend a few weeks waiting in line to see a cognitive behavioral therapist. Most people I know who are struggling say, I just wish I had someone to talk to, or, that somebody would reach out. We went ahead not seeing any proactive, non-clinical solutions on the market and reach the conclusion that, at a time when our mental health crisis is spiraling out of control, it could be the case that the one solution people want most is not just underrepresented, but nowhere to be found in the country. That’s the lead up to Happy.
Sara Sheehan: [00:15:04] That is a fascinating story. I had no idea that it had so many personal implications for you based on your own experience as well. I do find the disruptive nature of the service that you’re offering the most compelling part of it. The fact that it is non-clinical, the fact that it is frictionless, I find it absolutely-it is truly going to change the way companies interact with mental health opportunities and create a culture of support for employees. I know that you have had tremendous experience with customers having great return on investment, and I’d love to hear a little bit about some of the tremendous results that you are experiencing.
Jeremy Fischbach: [00:16:11] I’ll briefly say that Happy, just so the ROI makes sense, is really a few pieces. The main piece is frictionless mental health, and that is a nationwide network of non-clinical mental health providers, among if not the highest skilled mental health support network of it’s kind, that’s non-clinical. These are nurses, social workers, people with extensive backgrounds in healthcare. Then we obviously have a proactive delivery model that allows us to support people who could be members of a Medicaid or Medicare plan, or more to the point of the workforce, it could be workplace employees of any organization. We happen to be focused on large health systems, some of the largest in the country, the Department of Defense, Air Force, Army, and critically for anybody to get support in any of these environments, they don’t have to be struggling. They don’t have to be aware of that. If they are, they don’t have to reach a breaking point, they don’t have to research their benefits, they don’t have to connect their struggle to a benefit. No registration, no downloading an app, no opting in, no making an appointment, no waiting for appointment. They literally have to do nothing. The Pentagon, with whom we’re collaborating, refers to this as zero step support.
Jeremy Fischbach: [00:17:41] When you deliver support like that to people, Sara, amazing things happen. Number one, leading up to ROI, you get very high adoption rates and Happy has among the highest, if not the highest, adoption rates of any mental health service in the country. Not because we’ve been innovating in the actual support we’re providing. The support we’re providing, emotional support, has been around since the beginning of humanity. This is just undivided attention, compassion, encouragement. It’s because of, obviously, all the innovation and removing obstacles. In a Medicaid/Medicare population, our adoption rate is 20% to 30%. In a workplace, it’s 30 to 40%, which is much higher than an EAP, where you typically have adoption rates of 3%, 4% or 5%. Then we see clinical level impact, which means the same reduction in symptoms of isolation, stress, burnout, anxiety, depression that you’d see with a therapist. Sometimes Happy is doing this more rapidly than you’d see in therapy, because we don’t have the same obsolete scheduling system that most therapists have. We’re actually-when we encounter people measuring how much support they need to stabilize, 4.2 hours let’s say, and we’re giving people all that support right away.
Jeremy Fischbach: [00:19:17] We generate more workforce intelligence than any employee listening or employee survey company in the country. Huge amounts of anonymous, aggregated data that help employers fight turnover in real time. Help health plans address their members needs in real time. Then the ROI comes from all that. With a health plan, Happy’s achieving, in this case, the largest Medicaid plan in the country, almost an 8 to 1 ROI based on reduced health care spend. Just utilization of Happy reduces utilization of the emergency department, inpatient psych, any self-insured employer would benefit from a service like this for that reason. Then with our employer partners, large hospitals for example, we’re showing mostly high ROI based on lowered turnover, significantly lowered with one of the largest hospitals in the country. We’re reducing turnover by close to 40%. Most of that’s just the support we provide, but some of it’s all the real time analytics and our ability to help our partners quickly synthesize and respond to those data. In short, Sara, I would say in the workplace side, what’s leading to such high ROI with some of our partners over 25 to 1, given how affordable the service is.
Sara Sheehan: [00:20:49] That’s remarkable.
Jeremy Fischbach: [00:20:51] It’s mostly just helping our employers compress the time frame of their approach to turnover. I think there’s a lot of companies that view retention, engagement, turnover as something tied to employee engagement surveys, which may happen every six months or every year, sometimes even less frequently. With our partners, turnover is something we’re helping to fight on a daily basis, on a 24 hour time frame. Which is the same time frame that employees are experiencing when they are deciding whether to leave or stay.
Sara Sheehan: [00:21:27] Absolutely. Those numbers are remarkable to me because they’re double digits, they express a tremendous uptake or utilization of your service. Employees are responding, they’re leaning into it, which I know many companies, generally speaking, have a 1% to 4% uptake of EAP services. Comparatively, that is just remarkable to me.
Jeremy Fischbach: [00:22:06] Keep in mind, Sara, a lot of EAPs are designed not to be used, or are specifically not being improved upon because of a lack of utilization. The less an EAP is used, the more profit the company providing the EAP realizes. We had the largest health plan in the country. We’re talking to a director of their behavioral health commercial line, when we were talking to them about friction, they said, you’re misunderstanding friction as a bug rather than a feature. If employees actually navigate this gauntlet and access support, that comes out of our bottom line. It just has to be noted that, the systems that we have in place that oftentimes are very hard to use, and it could be traditional models, but it could be digital apps that force people to download an app and register and do self-guided surveys. They all have the effect of reducing the number of employees who get support. I’ll just observe that if you understand the vendors, how they make money, you’d be surprised to understand, perhaps, that the more people who end up making it through and getting support, the worse off they are, as in the vendor.
Sara Sheehan: [00:23:37] I’d love to hear some, Jeremy, about what your biggest challenges have been in starting your business and how you’ve overcome them.
Jeremy Fischbach: [00:23:47] The biggest challenges, I’ll put them in two categories, Sara. One is, it’s hard to start a company. It could be a lemonade stand or Happy. Any company, as you know, you’re an entrepreneur, is hard to get off the ground. One of the hardest professional things you could do is take something from your brain to the back of a napkin. That’s all been covered elsewhere, I don’t think it’s all that interesting to discuss. If any listener wants to understand how hard it is to start a company, you can type that into Google, and I think it’s been well covered. For us, I would say, the more interesting challenge has been-is very specific to mental health, Sara. It’s really, mental health, and the mental health paradigm and infrastructure we have, is very unique. It’s unique in a particular way, and specifically, there’s a lot of sacred cows. People do not like to challenge old ways of thinking, or even new ways of thinking, that are ineffective with mental health for a lot of reasons. One, I think this is one problem that does tie the whole country together. I don’t think that there’s very many people-I think it’s a bipartisan thing to say, that we’re experiencing a mental health crisis.
Jeremy Fischbach: [00:25:21] Mental health providers themselves, I know many of them. Some of the most accomplished mental health providers in the country are on Happy’s advisory board or service in other ways. They’re amazing people. I think that for some of those reasons, and also just because-there’s obsolete thinking in a lot of fields. Bad ideas don’t go challenged that much, and I think that has been Happy’s greatest challenge, is taking on both traditional and digital mental health, which are riddled with, in my view, bad ideas. As an example, Silicon Valley keeps spinning out and funding, this is just one example, new apps that are supposed to be the answer to old school mental health. They are based on very, I would say, suspicious assumptions. Many apps, for example, require users to take a lot of steps to eventually get to a therapist and pride themselves on giving users access to every single possible mental health option under the sun on the assumption that people are snowflakes. If ‘Sara’ is not the same as as her husband, or me, and today ‘Sara’ may want peach flavored kombucha, but tomorrow she may want watermelon infused sparkling water. We need to make sure ‘Sara’ has access to all this.
Jeremy Fischbach: [00:27:07] Happy has a very different position. It’s actually been hard to-it’s hard to combat the idea I just expressed than it has been to do anything else. Our assumption is that, we are in a drought with respect to mental health. People are literally dying of thirst, and we need to make sure that people have water. For us, the water of mental health is emotional support. Our mission has been, not to maximize options but to maximize adoption. If you just look at two scenarios people face when they’re struggling, since most people who are struggling have not downloaded apps, I think our model is self-evidently more likely to lead to somebody getting help. If you, Sara, are struggling right now, think about in which of these scenarios you’re more likely to get support. In one scenario, you have to download an app, you have to register, you have to even know that there’s an app to download. If you’ve gotten that far, you need to register, opt in, go through a lot of paperwork, probably do a medical history, self-guided assessments, it may be days before you can actually speak to somebody. Or alternatively, what if a call just came into your phone from one of the most caring people in the country?
Sara Sheehan: [00:28:35] The latter sounds amazing. I do love your comment about, bad ideas aren’t challenged enough. We need to set aside time so that we can be more creative and think of new ways to approach old businesses so that we are actually disrupting an industry. Yes, just getting a phone call from a caring person sounds wonderful to me. It sounds like the barrier has completely been dropped from where I need help, to having help.
Jeremy Fischbach: [00:29:27] That’s the idea. When we talk to our partners, it’s interesting to ask them to imagine how they would react if it were as hard to fulfill a lot of other basic needs as it is to get mental health support. Imagine to get toilet paper, they needed to go through all these steps, and it was days before they could get it. Imagine getting pizza required a lot of steps. Again, nothing’s coming for days. Or water. It is preposterous how difficult it is in the 21st century to get mental health support, but it’s because of bad ideas. In fact, I’ll say the ‘baddest’ idea of all, the worst trend that still dominates in mental health, Sara, as you and I have talked about, is over-clinicalization of mental health. The idea that the DSM, the ultimate catalog of mental health issues just keeps growing up to the point where, if somebody is feeling lonely after a divorce, they can get diagnosed with a temporary adjustment disorder.
Jeremy Fischbach: [00:30:42] This has real consequences. The reason this is so, is that mental health clinicians are more or less in charge of mental health in America. Just like lawyers have a tendency, if they’re just being lawyers, to write laws and coat everything in more rules and regulations, mental health clinicians, if they’re just doing their job, have the tendency to keep clinicalizing the human condition, including very common emotional states. The costs of clinicalization are really staggering. Every time we clinicalize an issue, it means that now it requires a clinician to treat it, and that clinician’s hundreds of dollars an hour perhaps, and there just aren’t enough of them, of course, so now it’s going to take weeks to get there. You’re going to have to fill out a whole bunch of paperwork, and you wonder why mental health is stigmatized. For anybody having to go through that much effort to get help and pay that much money, of course somebody’s going to think, wow, I must be really sick. So yeah, just a note on that.
Sara Sheehan: [00:31:57] It’s remarkable that a very simple approach can have such breakthrough impacts. I’d love to shine a light on that, which is why we are talking today, because people need to wake up and understand that it can be a simple answer, it can be easy to access and it can change your life.
Jeremy Fischbach: [00:32:31] I think so, Sara. I would ask you, not to turn the tables around, but I’m sure your listeners would appreciate hearing from you. Have you ever had a struggle in life, without getting into the details of the struggle, where you had friends or family just supporting you? Where it didn’t even involve therapy, but just your own support system came to the rescue?
Sara Sheehan: [00:33:01] Sure, and I’ve had situations where maybe I wish they could have been more available. I completely identify with your story so very much. Life has a way of having many twists and turns, it’s not a direct line. There are many ups and downs that people experience in life, and having a service like you’re offering, I can see how it would absolutely transform employee’s attitudes and desire to deliver at work. Because ‘my employer is caring about me’.
Jeremy Fischbach: [00:33:50] I think that’s spot on. I think you put it very well, Sara. I would just say, if I had a choice between two employers and one of them-and I really understood mental health inside and out, which most people just don’t think about it that much, but if I knew that they were just offering a standard EAP, and really what they were saying is, look, we care about you not enough to offer anything other than some of these wraparound services or an EAP that are going to require you to take dozens of steps and wait weeks to get support. If the choice were between that and an employer who said, I’m going to make sure one of the most caring people in the country is checking in on you every month and giving you unlimited support. That, to your point Sara, does say something different about the employer and if that’s their investment in me, makes me want to much more significantly invest in them in my work, etc. So I think you’re spot on.
Sara Sheehan: [00:34:56] Absolutely. I’d love to hear, Jeremy, what are you learning now, personally?
Jeremy Fischbach: [00:35:05] I was going to say, do you want a 20 minute treatise on what I’m learning about contracting with the Department of Defense? I think what I’m learning personally, is how important it is-I’ll say, we refer to our providers, Sara, as support givers. They are among the most caring people, caring community, I’ve ever met. They do what we alluded to. They check in on and provide unlimited support to large populations of people every month proactively. I think what I’m learning most through Happy, to be honest, is how important it is for me to be a support giver in my own life, with the people I work with, with the people who I live with, or in my family, etc. As I’ve shared with a few people, nowadays, when I get into the car, instead of putting on a podcast or listening to music, a lot of times I’ll just go through my phone. Not while I’m driving, but at stop signs or stop lights, and check in on the people in my life proactively. An amazing thing has happened. This is people who I work with, family, friends. Which is that, when my friends and family have learned, I guess from me in most cases, just how nice it is to have somebody check in on them.
Jeremy Fischbach: [00:36:44] I’m not trying to share at all times what’s going on in my life, I really want to hear what’s going on with them, they start doing that to me. What I’ve learned the most is, that for me, as important as personal development and self-help and this whole craze, that you could put in exercise and all our new fangled ways of thinking about nutrition and meditation. As much as I really appreciate that, the journey that I find myself on most now, is one where the arrow is much more clearly pointing outward toward other people. I find myself getting excited about becoming a better listener, getting excited about learning the nuances of compassion and encouragement. I still haven’t met a single person in years who ever came to me and said, I’ve got to tell you about this new X, Y, or Z, this new podcast I’m listening to, or book I’m reading. It’s getting me so excited about just supporting other people more effectively. It’s always about something that relates to themselves. So, that’s what I’ve learned most. I think that’s not just a way to build better relationships. I think professionally, personally, I truly believe that. It’s not just me, there’s many people in the country, thankfully, I think that are starting to do this kind of thing, but I think that, to me, is the beginning of a more supportive culture.
Sara Sheehan: [00:38:34] It absolutely is. Clearly you are the best example of paying it forward in your own life, where you are sharing of the support that you might have longed for at a different time in your life. Openly, without judgment, just caring about other people. That is an art that we need more present in our society. People need to care more. People need to be more kind and be fully available and present in the conversations that they do have. Jeremy, what are your big goals and aspirations that you’re working on right now?
Jeremy Fischbach: [00:39:39] I guess personally and professionally, I would just say, getting happy, farther off the ground. Creating a more supportive culture is maybe the broader goal. You and I have discussed working on a very long textbook, now, that’s all about the set of ideas that surround Happy, and is meant to be a blueprint for creating a more supportive culture. I think when I’m not stressed about the company, or one way that I actually escape from stress, which is inevitable to a startup, is by writing. Or doing writing the way I write, which is walking around the streets of New Orleans extemporaneously, trying to dictate a textbook into existence. That’s been a lot of fun, a lot of hard work. I can’t believe how many people have written one book, let alone multiple. It’s been a lot of fun to articulate all of these ideas that I find myself having more and more about. The importance of creating a more supportive culture and really how, in light of recent events, whoever is in the White House, whoever is in Washington, I really do believe each of us can, should, must do a lot more than we’re doing to create a supportive culture. I think it’s a beautiful thing that maybe Happy, the book, and just through conversations like this, we can inspire people to do that.
Sara Sheehan: [00:41:20] Absolutely. So when will your book come out? Do you have a target timeline?
Jeremy Fischbach: [00:41:26] 2090. I’m hoping within a couple of years. It’s just about done as a draft, so now we’re in a extensive editing phase. Some cool features to it, there’s going to be a lot of submissions. I’ll just say, there’s going to be not just my voice, but the voice of the people in this. A lot of the ideas that we’re talking about are new, but they’ve been blowing in the wind for a long time. So yeah, we’ll come back on when that book is out, we can talk about it.
Sara Sheehan: [00:42:01] I would love to have a conversation about it. It sounds like you’ll have, essentially, a multi-author situation where, maybe there would be articles or a chapter by another person. Is that kind of what you’re thinking?
Jeremy Fischbach: [00:42:18] I’m actually thinking that we’re going to write the whole book without any contributions first, and then with all the different areas, have so many submissions that we could completely remove our own voice from it, and just have a book by, for, from the people. From just ordinary people to experts and show that, as new and important as these ideas are, again, they’ve been out there, I think we’re just stitching them together in a very novel way that I hope has profound consequences. Because I think I’m seeing those consequences in my own life.
Sara Sheehan: [00:43:00] I am certain that it will. Very certain. So, Jeremy, is there anything else that is percolating in your mind that you’d like to share today?
Jeremy Fischbach: [00:43:17] Mostly, thank you, Sara, for giving me a chance to talk to you about this. I know that you’re as passionate about this as I am, and that really has come through in getting to know you. If your listeners want to know more about this, about Happy specifically or our approach, we try to lay it all out, more of an open source model. You can see more at frictionlessmentalhealth.com. I would just say on a personal note, as we go into Thanksgiving, in the holidays it’s quite a time for a lot of people, that I would encourage your listeners to, I’m sure many already are doing this, to go in with the simple mission of making every interaction as supportive as possible. When you encounter people, family members, friends, strangers, set a little goal of doing everything you can to support that person, leaving them feeling as supported as possible. It really simplifies life and I think makes it more supportive. That’s all I got, Sara.
Sara Sheehan: [00:44:32] It makes everything better when you have a good conversation with someone that really cares. It absolutely makes everything better, there’s no question about it. Well Jeremy, I can’t thank you enough for your time today. As we close, I would love for you to share if there is additional contact information. I know that you gave your website of frictionlessmentalhealth.com.
Jeremy Fischbach: [00:45:04] Check that out. Anybody can email me directly at jeremy@frictionlessmentalhealth.com. I would love to hear from any of your listeners, whether they’re-if they just want to talk more about this stuff. Obviously you and I, Sara, are collaborating, and I’m sure a lot of people may be interested in what you and I are trying to work on together. So yeah, we’d love to hear from people.
Sara Sheehan: [00:45:37] Absolutely. I can’t recommend what Jeremy’s doing enough. The power that it has to make an impact on employee culture in an organization, to make your employees want to stay and lean into your organization. It could even increase company revenue, which is a mind blowing possibility when you’re talking about mental health. I very much appreciate your time today, Jeremy, and I very much look forward to hearing comments from listeners.
Sara Sheehan: [00:46:17] Thank you so much for listening to today’s episode of Transformational Thinkers with Sara Sheehan where I interviewed Jeremy Fischbach, CEO of Happy. We explore the critical inefficiencies of traditional employee assistance programs and how Jeremy’s approach is revolutionizing the industry. Here are the three big takeaways from today’s discussion. First, frictionless support systems. Jeremy discusses the importance of removing friction from mental health support services. His company, Happy, offers proactive, zero step emotional support, ensuring employees receive care without the burden of navigating complex systems. The model boasts significantly higher adoption rates compared to traditional employee assistance programs. Second, ROI and workforce retention. Happy’s innovative approach doesn’t just improve employee wellbeing, it also results in tangible benefits for companies. By providing real time emotional support and data analytics, Happy has demonstrated high returns on investment, including an 8 to 1 ROI for a large Medicaid plan and a remarkable reduction in workforce turnover by up to 40% in some organizations. Third, simplifying mental health care. Jeremy critiques the over-clinicalization of mental health, which often increases stigma and complicates access to care. By offering non-clinical, supportive interactions that mirror the care of friends and family, Happy achieves clinical level outcomes in a simpler, more accessible manner. I can’t thank Jeremy enough for giving me some time out of his busy schedule. I feel like he, truly, is on the path of revolutionizing access to mental health in large organizations, and the return on investment in mental health, truly disrupting the industry. I would be remiss if I didn’t mention, please subscribe and never miss an episode.
