BooknHeal developing application to help people with mental health issues find the right psychotherapist

BooknHeal is a web service for appointment scheduling aiming to connect psychotherapists with people looking for help for mental health issues. The Finnish company is running a crowdfunding campaign on the platform of FundedByMe to finance further development and internationalization of the service. The company has already raised over € 32 000 from international crowd investors.

The company is developing an application for making finding the right psychotherapist even easier: a matchmaker that pairs clients’ needs, expectations and personalities with those of the therapists’ enlisted into the service. This novel approach is expected to speed up the time of looking for the right psychotherapist and to lower the threshold of seeking for help for mental issues, which in turn will result in less severe mental illness in population and less days off work and disability pensions due to mental disorders.

“The most important factor in successful psychotherapy is the relationship between the client and the therapist. A lot of research is done about that relationship; Now it is time to take the results of this research into action, and develop tools that will benefit not only the clients of psychotherapy but also the society”, says Anna-Maija Sulonen, an MD and a co-founder of BooknHeal, who is leading the research and development of the matchmaker.

BooknHeal aims to become the leading service portal in mental health in Europe. All the co-founders of the company have experienced the difficulty of finding help for mental disorders personally.

Globally, about 400 million people of all ages suffer from depression alone. Only one in three people with mental disorders seek for some kind of help for their situation. A significant reason for the lack of treatment is the difficulty of finding any help. There hasn’t been a primary service tract for psychological help until now, and information about psychotherapy and contact details for the therapists have been hard to find.