Do You Have A Crisis Plan? This Mental Health Advocate Is Making It Easier To Create One
ANANYA CLEETUS AND HER APP ARE CHANGING HOW TO PREPARE FOR A CRISIS SITUATION
By Kristina Benoist
Warning: Content discussed addresses suicide.
In mental health, a lot of conversations focus on the preventative and proactive steps you can take to avoid a crisis situation. But what happens when a crisis comes at you in full force — and you can’t avoid it? It’s incredibly difficult to organize your thoughts during a crisis, and taking the steps to feel better can be tough when you’re feeling weighed down by a mental health condition.
Through her own mental health journey, advocate Ananya Cleetus learned first-hand the importance of having a crisis plan. She combined her mental health experience with her computer science expertise to develop Anemone. The app helps you develop a crisis plan that can be shared with your support system and referred to during a mental health emergency, while also giving you national and local resources, coping skills, and grounding exercises. We sat down with Ananya to hear about how Anemone came to be, her interest in combining mental health and computer science, and the future of her mental health work.
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IDM: I'd love to just start by hearing how your mental health is today. How are you doing?
Ananya Cleetus: Oh, actually, you know, I'm doing pretty well today. There have been a lot of ups and downs and rough patches since the pandemic, but today is a good day.
IDM: Good, good! So, if you don't mind sharing, I'd love to hear a little about your mental health journey.
AC: I think for me, mental health has been a big part of my life for quite a while. I struggled with depression when I was in school quite a bit. But growing up in an Indian American family and an Indian American community, mental health wasn't something people talked about ever. It was completely swept under the rug — you couldn't mention it and couldn't talk about it. So I struggled a lot growing up. I think I learned to sort of put things off and not really address it.
“I learned then that my mental health is something that’s going to be with me for the rest of my life, and I need to focus on it.”
Around my junior year of college, things started to get really, really bad. That was the time that I was officially diagnosed with Bipolar Disorder. It was a complete shock because I didn't know anything about bipolar and didn't know what it entailed, really. It's the kind of thing you only see in movies and TV shows, and anyone with mental health issues is always vilified. And my junior year, I was in the hospital quite a bit. It was sort of a cycle of being in the hospital and then coming out. And I started to do worse and worse in school. Finally, I basically ended up on a ventilator at the hospital, after a very serious suicide attempt. And that was finally the point where my university was like, ‘alright, you got to go home.’ In retrospect, I think that was one of the best things that happened to me, because it gave me a lot of time away from distractions, and I just focused on my mental health. That was really where I hit rock bottom, I would say. I learned then that my mental health is something that's going to be with me for the rest of my life, and I need to focus on it. Thankfully, around that time, my family got on board because they realized how important and critical it was.
IDM: Thank you so much for being willing to share all of that. So how did your experience lead you into advocacy work? What initially sparked the idea for Anemone? How did you realize that there was a need for it?
AC: While I was home, I spent a lot of time in therapy, outpatient programs, inpatient hospitalization programs — different things like that. And I realized that, clearly, I'm not the only student who has been going through this. I noticed that, when you’re growing up, you learn a lot about physical crises. You learn stop, drop and roll. You learn about CPR and the Heimlich maneuver, and things like that. It's sort of drilled into you as a kid, but nobody has any idea what to do in a mental health crisis. Especially with college students.
“When you’re in a hospitalization program, they make you fill out a crisis plan, but it’s in a packet of papers. And I thought, ‘We have an app for everything. It’s about time we have an app for something like this.’”
That was when I had the idea for an app where you could basically create a crisis plan and share it with friends, family — anyone in your support network. And also to have easy access to resources. Not just national resources like the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline, but also resources based on your location, local crisis lines, local hospitals, and treatment centers. Typically, when you're in a hospitalization program, they make you fill out a crisis plan, after discharge but it’s in a packet of papers. If you're in crisis, you may not have the presence of mind to even know where to find it. And I thought, ‘We have an app for everything. It's about time we have an app for something like this.’ So I started working on Anemone.
It was around that time that I found out that I was readmitted to college, which was really exciting. So I came back to college, and I gave a TEDx Talk about my journey and my app. Since then, I've been working a lot on the app. I’m currently part of a program with the National Science Foundation, and we're working on a system to sort of create a crisis plan verification, where you can work with a therapist or someone to create the crisis plan. We're adding more coping skills to the app, trying to integrate it with wearables, like Apple Watch, Fitbit, that kind of thing.
IDM: So I’m guessing you’re staying incredibly busy with all of this work. That is incredible. I've had the chance to explore Anemone a little bit. And I think every part of the app is just so thoughtful, you mentioned the coping skills and creating your crisis plan. Every piece of it is important. How did you decide what to include?
AC: I mentioned that the initial inspiration was based on my own experiences. A lot of the mental health crises that I experienced, to be completely honest, were filled with a lot of police officers showing up — it wasn't ever a social worker. And they don't really have a lot of context or information. Honestly, some of them were pretty traumatic experiences for me, because they’re just trying to get you into an ambulance. There's no one who's really trying to listen to you or understand what’s going on, or what you're experiencing. There were definitely situations where I wasn't even in a good frame of mind to talk to them or cooperate with them. So I think having all that information in one place where you can have it with you anywhere you go, I think that was the main goal for me.
“Mental health is really all about compassion and connecting with another person.”
And then the resources, the coping skills, the grounding box, a lot of them are also things that I developed after talking to other therapists, psychiatrists, psychologists that I had visited, and saying, ‘What kind of features do you think would be important for your patients to have?’ So it was sort of a combination of my own experiences, and then talking to mental health professionals about things that they would find important to include.
IDM: You’ve found the perfect blend of both the medical side of things, but it's also very personal too. It just feels like a safe space in a lot of ways. So, as you mentioned, we have an app for absolutely everything. You’ve partnered technology and computer science with mental health. Do you think that digital tools serve an important role in mental health now?
AC: Yeah, I think the pandemic has definitely proved that with the increase in teletherapy. And I think technology can be a really good way to connect people to resources. You know, there are a lot of apps around therapy, coping skills, mindfulness, meditation, habit building. But the one thing that seems to be consistently ignored is the crisis component. There are a lot of people who deal with suicidal ideation and thoughts — especially people my age — or people who may be experiencing psychosis or some sort of other emergency. I think there's a huge gap in the tech space about handling situations like that. But that being said, I think there still needs to be that human component. Mental health is really all about compassion and connecting with another person. So you still need that personal touch. And I think if someone were to talk to a chatbot or some sort of AI software, I don't think that would really be helpful, in my opinion. I think that technology serves a good purpose in connecting people to resources, but at the end of the day, there needs to be some human component or someone there on the other end that’s willing to listen and help.
IDM: I completely agree. So you talk about the idea that having a crisis plan is something that’s really lacking in the mental health field. What else do you think we need to change about mental health in our world right now?
AC: The pandemic has obviously been really overwhelming, but the one good thing that I’ve seen come out of it is just increased compassion because everyone has realized we're all sort of in this together — people are struggling. And for a lot of people who may be new to feelings of depression, or loneliness, or different things like that, I think there's a deeper level of empathy and understanding that we've all sort of gained from being in this. And I really think that's here to stay. And I hope that we’ll treat mental health differently in general and understand the importance of mental well-being. With the pandemic, everyone was initially concerned about the physical aspects of COVID-19, but I think now there’s more focus on the mental health impacts of the pandemic and quarantine.
“There’s been — it’s sad to say — an increase in police-related violence and mental health situations. I think there’s a lot more awareness around how important it is to have social workers and people who have experience with mental health.”
IDM: You touched on something really important earlier, and an issue that’s really come to the forefront of all of our minds in recent months. The idea of police being the first responders in a mental health crisis.
AC: Yeah, I think there's been a huge increase in talk about police, which pertains a lot to crisis situations. Like I said, typically, it's police who show up in mental health crises. And there's been — it's sad to say — an increase in police-related violence in mental health situations. I think there's a lot more awareness around how important it is to have social workers and people who have experience with mental health. And you know, I've seen an increase in law enforcement getting training around mental health and in crisis intervention and stuff like that. It makes me happy to see that.
IDM: You know, so many crisis resources will call 911 if they think that you’re in danger of hurting yourself. It’s tough to grapple with the idea of people reaching out to a crisis line, in need of help, when there's the potential for resulting trauma and violence that can occur in those crisis situations. So how did that change how you built Anemone — if at all — especially if you’ve experienced that first-hand?
AC: I definitely struggled with that. And I think that's sort of why it’s so important to be able to own your crisis plan and customize it. Hopefully, as we work further on Anemone, it'll be easier to also send that information through to people so they’re informed of your situation beforehand. That's what we're working on right now. We've been talking to a lot of police officers and social workers about someone in a crisis once they call 911. We’ve been figuring out how information can get shared to the team that's responding to the person in crisis, on the scene, and potentially in a hospital, or wherever they're eventually sent. Basically, how do we transfer the crisis information, so that whoever is responding now has the full context on what the person is experiencing, any prior history, or any medications or symptoms. And I think a lot of the violence is also based in misunderstanding. Police don't know how to assess the threat if they don't know the full picture.
IDM: I love that Anemone does have all of that crisis information in one place. You can give people so much more insight into what you're experiencing. On a different note, you're in your final semester right now, what’s next for you? It seems like you have a lot of really exciting things happening right now, but what are you most excited about in the future?
AC: I'm definitely going to continue my work on Anemone. We've gotten a lot of really good funding, so we can continue developing some of the features, like the verification and working out the information transfer between first responders, more coping skills, wearable integration, different things like that. I'm really excited about that. But I’m also going into the tech workforce after school, and I want to focus on finding ways to also spread more mental health awareness in those communities. It’s just not something that's talked about often in tech or engineering. It's an area that's seen as very rigorous and challenging. Obviously, the work can be hard, but there's still a lot of room for people to be compassionate and kind and help each other. So I want to continue focusing on promoting mental health dialogue in those spaces, too.
IDM: I feel like some career paths are just known to be stressful by nature, and you’ve got to suffer through it. It's just been so ingrained in our heads to think that we have to struggle to succeed, but it doesn't have to be that way. So do you imagine focusing on Anemone full-time, or do you want to continue on the computer science path?
AC: I think I really think it's a combination of both, to be honest. I've gotten a chance to serve as a mental health advisor for a couple of different tech companies, like Google. There are definitely a lot of spaces where technology can improve access to mental health resources. And that's honestly exactly where I want to be.