Welcome to MEXA

Thoughts on designing products for people with mental illness from a product design director who has suffered through her own severe mental illness

In one of the photos in my selfie collection, I’m clutching the Emmy we’ve just won and grinning ear to ear. But every time I see that photo, I mourn a bit. The win was real, but my enthusiasm was entirely fabricated. Underneath that grin, I was absolutely desperate—exhausted from relentlessly drowning in anguish, tormented by an endless torrent of cruel intrusive thoughts, and yearning, longing, wishing, hoping, with every fiber of my being…to be dead.

I needed help.

Behind the Smile: A Hidden Reality

As the product design director of emerging digital products at NBC, I spend a lot of time in conversations around user needs. The AI, app, and web teams I manage are asking the important questions of, “How do we build something that is actually valuable and not just another technological gimmick?” I’m proud that our organization manages to be dedicated to the real humans we build for. As is appropriate in our domain, we’re purposefully considering how to make things that are useful and create joy—both real human needs. (Have you ever run a prompt on Cat GPT?? Try and argue with me that the world is not a better place because humor like that exists.)

But, I’ve never met a user need as profound to me as mental health and so, as you embark on your journey to build AI products that make a difference in the world, I’m here to have the same kind of conversation with you that I have with my talented colleagues as we design products—let’s honor the real humans we are building for by serving them in ways that matter to them. But to do that, you need to know who they are and what they really need.

Meeting Real Needs Starts with Real Stories

Unlike the user needs I encounter in my day job, the ones you are going to have to understand and address to build a successful product can be quite elusive. Mental illness is a pervasive but incredibly invisible reality. No one celebrating the Emmy win that day had any idea that, in the midst of our cheerful conversations, I was haunted by the presence and reality of my own deeply desired death.

The fact that we casually use the word “depression” to mean anything from mild disappointment to a debilitating brain disease goes a long way to obscure the intense suffering of the severely mentally ill in our midst, as does the dehumanizing stigma that exists around all brain diseases.

I don’t know that I’ve found the right words to adequately convey the needs found in that suffering, or if the right words even exist, but nonetheless we need to talk about it. We need to talk about it because this mission you’ve embarked on—to use technology to address the suffering of mental illness—MATTERS. The user needs are REAL They are DEEP. But to meet those needs, you need to meet your users. You have to hear their stories. I certainly can’t speak for everyone with severe mental illness, but I can share my story.

“They assume that, if I had tried harder and been more positive, I could have just “gotten over it.” I couldn’t.”

I’ve always been a high functioning, slightly awkward but very friendly person, so when I say I struggled with depression, people assume I was feeling pretty down. They don’t assume that I lived in constant, unyielding despair, was incapable of feeling any pleasure, couldn’t escape my deep, scathing self-hatred, had intense physical urges to end my own life, and couldn’t stop the stream of incessant intrusive thoughts that I didn’t deserve to be alive anyhow. They assume I had a pervasive “bad mood;” they don’t assume my own brain was trying to kill me. They assume that, if I had tried harder and been more positive, I could have just “gotten over it.” I couldn’t.

I was lucky though—after 21 different antidepressants, 15 years of therapy, 72 sessions of transcranial magnetic stimulation, two years of monthly IV infusions of ketamine, 40 rounds of electroconvulsive therapy, and two in-patient psychiatric hospitalizations, I finally wearily stumbled upon the clinical trial that saved me from the vortex of agony.

A team of incredibly compassionate scientists, data analysis, doctors, and other medical practitioners went out of their way to understand and address their patients’ needs. (No one ever tried harder than the principal investigator on the study to understand my actual experience of the disease!) And so they were able to use their innovative, persistent spirit to develop a new treatment that turned my life around completely—after receiving the deep brain stimulation implant, my decades-long “treat-resistant” disease vanished in five days.

All of the sudden, I discovered what it felt like to feel calm. I felt enjoyment for the first time in my adult life. I finally heard the silence of a quiet mind, and my intense cravings and intrusive thoughts about death vanished. For literally the first time in 23 years, I could finally smile—and MEAN it.

Designing with Compassion Changes Lives

When you create solutions for people in this space, you are giving us a gift that is incredibly profound. I received not just the ability to exist in the world without constant, severe mental pain, but also the desire to even exist at all. My life is staggeringly less miserable, but I also finally have what most people take entirely for granted: the ability to be at peace with the fact that I’m alive.

I’d just like to make sure, before I end, that I express my heartfelt gratitude for the work that you are doing for people like me. Our needs may often be hard to see, but they are significant. You have the power to meet those needs and your desire to use that power for the good of those still suffering is deeply inspiring, encouraging, and humanzing. Thank you.

Amanda Geisinger is the product design director for emerging products at NBC News Digital. She also nurtures a daily practice of cartoon making, capturing the small, sweet and delightful moments she encounters on the streets of New York City, where she lives. She’s a lived experience expert, surviving more than two decades of severe major depressive disorder.

Over the past several months, MEXA has been dedicated to fostering a thriving community at the intersection of mental health and artificial intelligence. Through many workshops, panel discussions, match-making, and collaborative events, we've brought together researchers, clinicians, and lived experience experts to explore how generative AI can improve mental health outcomes. Through these events and opportunities, we’ve put the focus on connection with the goal of community members meeting each other and growing budding collaborations.

Now, all that work has culminated in an exciting new opportunity: the MEXA Generative AI for Mental Health Research Accelerator. This four-month program is designed to support interdisciplinary teams as they prepare foundational research on using generative AI to improve measurement and intervention in anxiety, depression, and psychosis. With generous funding from Wellcome, this accelerator will provide the mentorship, strategic guidance, and resources teams need to pilot research and model development — ultimately positioning them for a unique and exclusive(!) funding opportunity from Wellcome of up to £3 million per award.

Through my time supporting MEXA’s many events, I've seen the enthusiasm of our presenters, panelists, and participants. Together we’ve explored what it means to embed lived experience in your work, how to think about the unique risks and benefits of using health data in LLMs, and what’s happening already at the cutting edge of mental health and AI research. As a community we’ve also hosted two awesome hackathons that resulted in thoughtful and imaginative projects. The accelerator builds on this strong foundation the community has established — a network of experts eager to push the boundaries of what’s possible with AI and mental health research.

Participants in the accelerator will gain:

• Comprehensive support for developing compelling research proposals
• Practical workshops on designing pilot experiments and managing collaborative research projects
• Funding for both pilot research and model development
• Financial support for team members without existing salaried positions
• Expert guidance for integrating lived experience into research
• Ethics support to ensure responsible AI development

Our journey as a community has always been about bringing together diverse voices — from researchers to those with lived mental health experiences — to develop solutions that are both innovative and meaningful. The accelerator represents the next major step in that journey.

If you're a researcher, clinician, developer, or lived experience expert interested in joining a team or forming your own, I encourage you to participate. Applications are open to teams worldwide (see full applicant requirements here), and individuals seeking to join a team can be matched with a team during the Expression of Interest stage ahead of the Accelerator application deadline. I also encourage you to lean on the connections you’ve made over the last several months to build a diverse team.

To learn more, join us for the Accelerator Launch Webinar on 24 March 2025. Choose the session that works best for you: 10:00 - 11:00 UTC or 17:00 - 18:00 UTC. You can register here.

This accelerator is more than just a program — it's the culmination of months of community-building, shared knowledge, and collective ambition. I can't wait to see the incredible projects that will emerge from it.

Stay connected with MEXA, and let's continue building a better future for mental health together.

Contributed by Courtney Dean

MEXA’s first Hackathon, Mental Health and AI: Measurement, brought together innovators to explore how generative AI can revolutionize mental health assessment.

Participants in this hackathon tackled the challenge of measurement - exploring how LLMs, language, and other data sources could improve the way we assess and track mental health over time. Traditional mental health assessments often rely on static, subjective self-reports, but mental health is a dynamic and fluctuating state. The projects aimed to provide more detailed and nuanced insights into how individuals experience their symptoms and how mental health conditions evolve. Solutions ranged from research tools to professional applications, all designed to help healthcare providers or individuals better understand mental health conditions beyond conventional diagnostic labels.

A key aspect of this challenge was ensuring that solutions were shaped by lived experience expertise. Teams were encouraged to engage with end users - people with firsthand experience of mental health challenges - to test their assumptions and design safe, effective, and ethical tools. By integrating AI-driven insights with human perspectives, the projects from this hackathon push the boundaries of how we measure and understand mental health.

Explore the innovative projects from the Mental Health and AI: Measurement Hackathon below:

Interested in learning more about MEXA? Visit our About page; or apply directly at www.mexa.app

MEXA’s recent Hackathon, Mental Health and AI: Intervention (held January 26-29, 2025), brought together a diverse group of participants, including data scientists, mental health professionals, and technology enthusiasts. This collaborative event aimed to harness the power of artificial intelligence to develop innovative solutions addressing various mental health challenges. Over the course of the hackathon, teams worked together to create projects that could transform mental health care, making it more accessible, personalized, and effective.

This hackathon challenged participants to explore how AI could complement and enhance mental health interventions without overstepping ethical or safety boundaries. Projects ranged from developing specialized models tailored for therapeutic interactions to designing new frameworks that integrate AI with human professionals to create a more effective and scalable support system. A core emphasis of the event was ensuring that all solutions were shaped by lived experience expertise, prioritizing the needs and safety of those most affected by mental health challenges.

Explore the innovative projects from the Mental Health and AI: Intervention Hackathon below:

Interested in learning more about MEXA? Visit our About page; or apply directly at www.mexa.app