Hi friend,
This email is a bit late today...
As some of you know, I spend most of my year in Bondi, Australia. This weekend, we witnessed a terrible tragedy.
Thankfully, I’m fine and so are my loved ones, but many people were not so lucky. Over the last two days, I’ve been trying to navigate the aftermath, balancing time off with attempts to return to some sense of normality.
The response from the community has been truly beautiful. People are coming together, caring for each other, holding each other and taking the first small steps towards healing. Despite the tragedy, this response has reminded me that our true power is in love, in kindness and in the unity of our shared humanity.
My thoughts are with everyone affected, and I just hope we can continue to fight for a better, more peaceful world.
Keep fighting the good fight!
Steve
What happened in mental health last week?
Business News:
⏺️ Radial raised $50M to advance non-traditional, fast-acting mental health treatments, including brain stimulation therapies and rapid-acting medications. (link)
⏺️ Ritten raised $35M in Series B funding to expand its AI-enabled practice management platform for behavioural health providers. (link)
⏺️ Lin Health raised $11M in Series A funding to grow its virtual chronic pain recovery platform using neuroscience-driven behavioural therapy and AI. (link)
⏺️ Empathy Health Technologies raised $7.6M for its Sober Sidekick relapse-prevention platform for substance use disorder. (link)
⏺️ Handspring Health acquired Joon Care. (link)
⏺️ Flow received FDA clearance for the at-home brain stimulation device to treat major depressive disorder. (link)
⏺️ Sword Health released MindEval, an open-source framework for evaluating clinician LLMs in mental health support. (link)
⏺️ Headway published their 2025 annual report, sharing that they added over 22,000 providers to their platform during the year. (link)
⏺️ The EHR provider Allia launched Allia for Practices (link)
⏺️ NHS Confederation announced a new project supported by Limbic to explore how AI can be safely and effectively adopted across mental health services in the UK. (link)
⏺️ CMS announced $100M for the MAHA ELEVATE programme, funding 30 organisations with approximately $3.3M each over 3 years to test lifestyle medicine interventions, including nutrition, physical activity, sleep, stress management and social connection. (link)
⏺️ FDA provided additional details about TEMPO, the pilot programme for digital health tools, with statements of interest opening 2 January 2026. (link)
⏺️ A White House executive order directed agencies to evaluate and potentially preempt state AI laws, establishing an AI Litigation Task Force to challenge laws deemed "burdensome to innovation". (link)
⏺️ A group of state attorneys general sent a letter to major AI companies, including OpenAI, Google, Microsoft, and Anthropic, warning them to address delusional outputs or risk breaching state law. (link)
⏺️ The Verge reported that AI chatbots are struggling with suicide hotline numbers, with many major chatbots failing tests on how they respond to suicide and self-harm disclosures. (link)
Research News:
⏺️ A new study found that anti-inflammatory treatments may be safe and effective at reducing depressive symptoms and anhedonia in depressed individuals with heightened inflammation. (link)
⏺️ A Nature study mapping over 1 million cases found that the common genetic variation underlying 14 major psychiatric disorders clusters into five shared genomic factors that explain most of the heritable risk and reveal extensive genetic overlap across traditional diagnostic categories. This challenges current diagnostic boundaries and points to biologically informed groupings of mental illnesses. (link)
⏺️ A new BMJ Journal of Medical Ethics & Philosophy article argued that digital health trials often use inadequate placebo controls, with waitlist comparisons failing to account for placebo effects and potentially inflating efficacy claims while obscuring harms, particularly for vulnerable populations. (link)
⏺️ A Journal of Adolescent Health editorial found that social support delayed cascades between alcohol misuse and internalising symptoms in youth, with supported young people taking years longer to progress into co-occurring problems. (link)
⏺️ University of Edinburgh researchers found that 20.2% of individuals born in 2005 accessed NHS child/adolescent mental health services by age 18, compared to 5.8% of those born in 1991. (link)
⏺️ A Biological Psychiatry study led by Orygen PhD student Muskan Khetan found that earlier exposure to oestradiol during puberty can lead to faster brain maturation and greater risk of mental ill-health in girls. (link)
⏺️ Microsoft research analysing 37.5 million Copilot conversations found health was the number one topic, with temporal patterns showing existential questions late at night and philosophical conversations in early morning hours. (link)
