Benefits
- No qualifications, funding or experience needed (perfect for students)
- Potentially successfully treat one mental illness per day worked
- Get results in one month
- Phenomenal CV material for incubation programs
- Low-risk of doing harm, perfect first project
Drawbacks
- Entirely voluntary for at least the first 2 months
- You will face rejection and indifference multiple times daily
- Require immense discipline to execute successfully
Background Information
There are dozens of global mental health charities whose treatment programs receive overly complex clients. No or inappropriate care is the usual outcome for these clients. A substantial minority of Western therapists would happily help them pro bono via Zoom. Let's connect willing therapists to clients.
Example Project Outline
| Description of the task | Man-hours required to execute |
| Message 300 therapists with semi-personalized messages. Expect 15-30 responses. Create a LinkedIn page. | 30 |
| Have open-ended discussions with each, asking about their willingness to take on pro bono cases, what their availability is, what their concerns would be, what they'd get out of it, and whom you should speak to next. | 30 |
| Use the information gathered to write a compelling cold email and a sign-up form. Send it out to ~200 therapists. Use trackable links so you can see how many people opened the form, and where people who dropped off the form did so. Make a LinkedIn post based on the cold email. | 60 |
| Optimise the email and form. Send to another 200 therapists | 30 |
| Repeat. | 30 x n |
| Once the email and LinkedIn posts are working well, tell us. We'll share the post on our LinkedIn and encourage our network to do the same. We'll buy access to a mailing list with ~10K or so therapists, and send out your email. We'll then connect the therapists to clients needing their services. |
The above is just an example of how it could be done, the details will be left to you!
How we'd help you
- We've got 3.5 years of experience running EA mental health projects with volunteers. We can give you high-level advice and feedback on your plans/marketing materials
- Two thirty-minute mentorship sessions weekly
- 1M in public liability insurance in case you fuck up!
- Free Fiscal Sponsorship for any project/organisation that results from this.
Rewards if You Successfully Pair 100 Clients with Suitable Therapists
- I'll help you write a grant application to a fund of your choice for a global health project of your choice.
- I've raised or helped raise >$400K in seed funding for global health projects over the past 18 months, ~$280K of which was via grant applications
- A glowing reference for any job/incubation program
- We'd likely offer to hire you to lead other global mental health projects
Sign up here
https://forms.gle/984h1pyFmMPVqCaF9
This is amazing and makes so much sense to me. I hope at least one person takes up this great idea!
This is an interesting idea, I think your post could be stronger & allow people to evaluate whether they want to participate better if it was more clear on the following points:
Logistics related:
Intervention related:
Quick question - my wife is a provisionally licensed LPC in the US. I know there's a lot of rules on how they are allowed to practice (like they must be with a client within their state of licensure). Do these rules just not apply when working internationally?
It varies by state and licensing body I'd imagine. Unfun fact - In the UK literally anyone can call themselves a therapist or psychologist without repercussion.
https://acpuk.org.uk/lack-of-protection-of-the-psychologist-title/