Hi friend,
A LOT has happened in the past seven days.
If you’re scanning this, make sure not to miss the Talkspace and Acadia news, the “wevals” idea and if you’re an early-stage business, be sure to check out the Headstream accelerator.
On the research side, there are some fascinating findings on delusions, eTNS and, very importantly, the state of innovation in psychotherapy.
Let’s get into it!
What happened in mental health last week?
Business News:
⏺️ Talkspace presented at JPM. Their presentation focused largely on their AI agent, which they mentioned would be first launched as a direct-to-consumer product. They gave no specific launch dates, however. They also noted that licensing their LLM is an option they are considering. (link)
⏺️ Acadia Healthcare also presented at JPM. They performed poorly financially in 2025, expecting to miss their initial adjusted EBITDA guidance by $100M. This was largely due to lower than expected occupancy, significant litigation costs and payer rate pressure. Despite this, they added 707 net new beds in 2025 (opened 1,089 and closed 382). Their share price is down ~73% YoY. (link)
⏺️ ICANotes, a Maryland behavioural health EHR, raised $500k from Sheridan Capital Partners. (link)
⏺️ Sam Altman's brain-computer interface company, Merge Labs launched with $252M in funding. (link)
⏺️ Marvin Health launched AI coaches. Marvin clients (who are healthcare workers) will be able to use the AI coaches to access on-demand support. (link)
⏺️ SimplePractice released SimpleConnect, an enterprise tool allowing their partners to more easily connect with a network of over 250,000 mental health providers. (link)
⏺️ Neurolief was granted FDA PMA approval for its at-home brain neuromodulation therapy. The treatment is approved as an adjunctive treatment for adults with MDD who failed to achieve satisfactory improvement from at least one previous antidepressant medication. This follows Flow’s approval late last year. (link)
⏺️ At DLD, Audrey Tang presented his work on “Wevals”, an open platform for building and sharing AI evaluations. Wevals (Wikipedia for evaluations) lets you create evals for domains that matter to you and review the performance of models against any evals on the platform. Examples include evals on mental health safety and non-sycophancy. It’s worth thinking about how this model could be adopted to improve AI in mental health. (link)
⏺️ In Psychedelics, MindMed rebranded to Definium Therapeutics and announced that they expect three Phase 3 readouts in 2026. (link)
⏺️ SAMHSA reversed $2B in funding cuts less than 24 hours after abruptly terminating funding for nearly 2,800 grants. (link)
⏺️ The Trevor Project announced that it received a $45M philanthropic gift from MacKenzie Scott. (link)
⏺️ ARPA-H announced $50M to scale a national paediatric data and knowledge network to improve health outcomes for children with complex diseases. (link)
⏺️ The Canadian Government announced up to $120M in funding for the 9-8-8 Suicide Crisis Helpline. (link)
⏺️ Headstream Innovation opened applications for the 2026 Headstream Accelerator, offering $30K non-dilutive funding and a 16-week programme for digital youth mental wellbeing startups. (link)
⏺️ Utah launched a pilot program to allow an AI system to renew certain prescription medications. (link)
⏺️ McKinsey Health Institute published a new report on the state of global Brain Health. It’s a good report worth reading, but what stood out to me was a reminder that brain health conditions account for 24% of global disease burden (affecting 1+ billion people), yet mental health still receives only 2% of government health budgets. (link)
Research News:
⏺️ Fascinating new research published in The Lancet Psychiatry demonstrated that delusions in first-episode psychosis emerge from embodied emotions - particularly shame, love, and awe - that transform how people physically experience themselves and others. The study also showed that early trauma creates emotional sensitivities that, when reactivated by later stressful events, generate delusional realities grounded in specific bodily feelings and interpersonal narratives. This challenges the dominant cognitive model of delusions as purely mental phenomena and suggests that treatment could be enhanced by attending to bodily feelings, emotional patterns, and environmental factors alongside existing approaches. (link)
⏺️ A systematic review of the ability of wearable devices to assess anxiety disorders was published in Nature. The study found that heart activity was the most reliable signal, but combining several signals gives more accurate results than any single signal. Overall, the study noted that while there is potential for wearables in assessing anxiety disorders, it’s hard to draw firm conclusions from the current evidence base.
⏺️ New results published in Nature Medicine evaluating external Trigeminal Nerve Stimulation (eTNS) showed no significant differential treatment effects on ADHD symptoms. Neurosigma’s eTNS device received FDA clearance in 2019 as the first device-based, non-pharmacological treatment for ADHD. In December, Neurosigma announced a $1M investment to scale the manufacturing of its device.
⏺️ A new study found that AI-generated, fake patient stories can be used to train and test mental health assessment tools. This offers a privacy-friendly way to develop these technologies, although researchers emphasise that models must still be validated on real patients before clinical use. (link)
⏺️ A World Psychiatry article provided a great assessment of the state of innovation in psychotherapy for mental disorders. The study noted that despite efforts, there are indications that outcomes for mental disorders have not improved in decades - for example, outcomes for depression have not improved since the 1990s, despite the availability of more effective treatments. The authors conclude that none of the current innovations in psychotherapy will be a silver bullet for improving outcomes or uptake of treatments and that only improve outcomes, suggesting that “only the joint implementation of several of them may produce tangible improvements.” (link)
That’s all for this week.
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Keep fighting the good fight!
Steve Duke
Founder of Hemingway
