Hi friend,

I hope your week is off to a great start. For my fellow Londoners, I hope you’re enjoying the Bank Holiday and surviving the heat wave (I’m not!).

Before we get into today’s round-up, a quick reminder that today is the last day to contribute to The Hemingway Audience Survey. The insights from this survey will guide what we create for you as a reader. So please take the 3 minutes to fill out.

Now, let’s get you up to date with everything that’s been happening…

⏺️ The Path raised $14.3M for its AI mental health platform. The Path have built an AI app on post-trained open-source models, attempting to give it greater control over its safety architecture. Tony Robbins is a Co-Founder of the business and their AI Coaching product is built using on his frameworks. Building AI on top of the IP of self-help personalities is an interesting trend that I predicted last year. The Path also have another product that they explicitly position as “AI Therapy” with eleven “AI Therapists” listed on their website. I kinda thought we were past that… I guess not. (link)

⏺️ Aetna cut rates for longer and more complex therapy sessions. Effective July 15, Aetna will pay the same rate for 53-minute sessions as for 37-to-52-minute sessions, the same rate for highly complex patients as for moderately complex ones, and the same rate for doctoral-level providers as for master's-level providers. Alma notified its provider network last week with many therapists clearly unhappy. Rate cuts like this are a huge challenge for the ecosystem but are increasingly likely given the cost pressure payers are experiencing. (link)

⏺️ Vibrant Emotional Health retained its role as 988 Lifeline administrator. SAMHSA awarded Vibrant a new five-year, $225M cooperative agreement under a competitive recompete process, beginning May 15. (link)

⏺️ Roblox announced mental health partnerships targeting resilience and crisis support. The gaming platform partnered with mental health nonprofit Koko and Northwestern University's Lab for Scalable Mental Health to build a game teaching resilience against bullying. Roblox also expanded its partnership with crisis support service ThroughLine, joined cross-platform self-harm signal-sharing initiative Thrive, and published a Gaming & Mental Health guide for teens. (link)

⏺️ Headspace Survey found 92% of US workers report mental or cognitive strain. The Workforce State of Mind report, based on a survey of 724 workers at large employers, found 37% say strain has increased over the past 12 months. Unclear company priorities, job security, and AI are the top drivers. Only 27% of women say their organisation is meeting their mental health needs, compared to 34% of men. (link)

⏺️ SimplePractice report found insurance pays $40 less per session than self-pay. The practice management platform's first annual report covers 113.6 million sessions delivered by independent clinicians in 2025, of which 58.8% were insurance-based. The average self-pay rate was $139.75 versus an average insurance reimbursement of $99.75. Medicaid acceptance stands at 25.2% and Medicare at 20.5%. Burnout, administrative burden, and insurance difficulties are cited as the biggest daily challenges for therapists. AI note-taking reached 10.2% adoption. (link)

⏺️ WHO Europe released a quality improvement tool for child and youth mental health services. The framework is designed to help countries across the WHO European Region strengthen access, consistency, and accountability in care delivery. (link)

⏺️ Meta settled the first school district lawsuit over youth mental health costs. Breathitt County School District in Kentucky settled with Meta ahead of a June 15 trial in Oakland. The district accused the companies of designing platforms to keep young users engaged in ways that drove anxiety, depression, and self-harm, and leaving schools to absorb the costs. Settlement terms were not disclosed and co-defendants YouTube, Snap, and TikTok had already settled. This serves as a bellwether case for roughly 1,200 similar lawsuits. (link)

⏺️ Brazil began enforcing new workplace mental health regulations on May 26. The new regulations will require companies to identify, assess, and manage psychosocial risks — including stress, burnout, and harassment — as part of their formal occupational risk management programmes. (link)

⏺️ MIT Media Lab published a framework for measuring AI's impact on human wellbeing. The report was produced by 80 experts from over 40 institutions including Stanford, Harvard, Oxford, OpenAI, and Microsoft Research and argues that current AI benchmarks measure task performance but not longer-term effects on human cognitive, emotional, and social outcomes — which I agree with. The proposed framework evaluates AI across three dimensions: reasoning and agency, curiosity and learning, and healthy emotional and social lives. (link)

If you find these updates valuable and would like to connect with other leaders in mental health innovation, consider joining the Hemingway Community.

As a member of the community, you’ll join over 450 other mental health leaders and get access to exclusive content, events and resources. For example, all the notes and clips from our recent Session with Derrick Hull from Slingshot AI on nine myths of AI in mental health.

⏺️ Lancet analysis finds 1.17 billion people currently live with a mental disorder, a 95.5% increase since 1990. The Global Burden of Disease study, published in The Lancet, measures death and disability across every major condition in every country. The 2023 edition was released last week and estimated that 1.17 billion people currently live with a mental disorder, a 95.5% increase since 1990. Mental disorders account for 171 million disability-adjusted life years (DALYs) and 17.3% of all years lived with disability, driven primarily by anxiety, depression, and schizophrenia. The sharpest burden falls on 15-to-19-year-olds, reinforcing the case for early intervention. Mental disorders now rank 5th globally for health loss, up from 12th in 1990, reflecting both growing prevalence and the fact that other conditions have become more treatable. The data shows that most of the growth in health burden is driven by depression and anxiety in young people. (link)

⏺️ Only 19 digital mental health tools are in formal NHS procurement today, down from 48 in England alone in 2015. An FOI study assessed DMHIs procured by NHS trusts and found significant consolidation over the last decade, with only 2 technologies (Silvercloud and ieso) persisting across the period. The authors argue the contraction reflects tighter evidence standards. Seven of the fifty trusts reported procuring no digital mental health interventions at all. (link)

⏺️ AI predicted adolescent mental health risks accurately, but diagnostic errors remain a barrier. A scoping review of 24 studies found AI tools consistently identified mental health risks in adolescents with high accuracy and helped expand access to assessment in settings with limited clinician availability. However, the review found that diagnostic errors and data privacy concerns are the two most significant barriers preventing these tools from moving from research into routine clinical use. (link)

⏺️ Heatwaves increased psychiatric emergency consultations and hospital admissions in northern Italy. A time-series study in Bolzano found cumulative heat exposure was a stronger predictor of psychiatric service use than isolated temperature peaks. The findings provide further evidence that climate change will place additional strain on mental health services. (link)

⏺️ New GABA-targeting compound showed antidepressant effects within 7 days in a Phase 1 trial. HS-10353 is a GABA-A positive allosteric modulator — a compound that works by enhancing the brain's main inhibitory signalling system, which is disrupted in depression. Unlike most antidepressants that take weeks to act, the Phase 1 trial found clinically meaningful reductions in depressive symptoms within 7 days. The compound showed a clean safety profile with once-daily oral dosing, supporting its progression to larger trials for treatment-resistant depression. (link)

⏺️ Modified PTSD therapy reduced distress by addressing multiple traumas in sequence. Standard prolonged exposure therapy treats one traumatic memory at a time, which can be poorly suited to military personnel who have experienced multiple traumatic events. A study of 199 service members tested a graduated approach that works through traumas sequentially, from least to most distressing. Participants receiving this modified approach showed lower distress during treatment compared to those in standard prolonged exposure, suggesting the modification may improve tolerability in complex trauma cases. (link)

⏺️ Systematic review identified two pathways driving internet addiction in hospitalised adolescents. A review of 24 studies found that adolescents with internet addiction tend to follow one of two distinct pathways: emotional dysregulation, where excessive internet use serves as a way to manage difficult feelings, and social compensation, where it substitutes for real-world social connection they feel unable to achieve. The authors proposed a new theoretical model built on these two pathways to guide clinical assessment and treatment frameworks. (link)

⏺️ Community mental health programme reduced common mental disorders in Zambian mothers. Problem Management Plus for Moms (PM4M) is a brief, structured psychological intervention delivered by trained non-specialists in community settings. A study of the programme in Zambia found it reduced rates of common mental disorders among participants, while also strengthening social support networks and improving financial wellbeing. Stigma and the need to adapt the programme to local cultural contexts were identified as the main barriers to scaling it. (link)

⏺️ Study mapped 36 social determinants of perinatal mental health in rural India. Researchers conducted structured interviews across rural Telangana in India to identify the social factors that shape mental health outcomes during and after pregnancy. They identified 36 distinct determinants — spanning poverty, social support, gender norms, access to healthcare, and food security — and organised them into a framework intended to guide the design of targeted interventions in low- and middle-income settings where biomedical models of perinatal care are harder to implement. (link)

That’s all for this week.

Keep fighting the good fight!

Steve Duke

Founder of Hemingway

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