While awareness is growing of the urgent need to address the mental health crisis in the U.S., Dawn Androphy points out that one group of people is often left out of the discussions: LGBTQ+ communities, for whom she says there are few options. It is this giant gap in care that she wants to help fill through her startup Allswell.
Through virtual group sessions, Allswell is providing affordable services with therapists who are sensitive to the needs of LGBTQ+ individuals. “My goal is to use the power of group therapy, technology, and scale to offer an affordable mental health solution,” Androphy says.
“I’ve been involved in LGBTQ advocacy in some form since I was 18. After I graduated from college, it was really important for me to do work specific to the LGBTQ+ community.”
Androphy and her co-founder, Connor Gordon, had long planned to start a business together. At Microsoft, the two friends worked in adjacent buildings that shared a cafeteria. Although conversations over lunch confirmed their mutual desire to make an impact, they had yet to identify which community they wanted to serve and in what sector, something that Androphy’s time at Stanford helped solidify.
While studying for her MBA at Stanford GSB, she took a class called Biodesign and Entrepreneurship for Societal Health, taught by Stanford adjunct professor, Narges Baniasadi, which focused on building equitable healthcare companies. This opened her eyes to the potential for commercial enterprises to address social challenges. “It helped me understand how to build a business around a marginalized population in health care that could better serve those communities,” she says, adding that Baniasadi has provided key mentorship along with Stanford GSB lecturer, Margaret Laws, Androphy’s instructor in the Startup Garage course she took to further her work on the venture idea.
As she dove into research on both mental health disparities and LGBTQ+ health care disparities, Androphy came to understand the depth of the crisis and the gap in solutions for people unable to access free services or afford high-end treatments, particularly frontline workers and students. “My goal is that everyone who is LGBTQ+ can access mental health care,” she says.
The Problem
The mental health crisis facing the LGBTQ+ community is hard to overstate. A 2023 report by the Trevor Project found that 34% of LGBTQ people had considered suicide over the previous year, 67% were experiencing anxiety, and 54% were experiencing depression. Yet more than half (56%) of those who reported seeking mental health care said they were unable to obtain it.
Some nonprofits and community health centers provide services dedicated to LGBTQ+ communities. However, while they might offer drop-in support groups led by volunteers, with limited resources, these organizations find it hard to treat acute mental health crises. What’s missing is reliable ongoing mental health care that meets clinical best practices and is attuned to the experiences of LGBTQ+ people, says Androphy.
When it comes to mental health, exclusion takes many forms. For example, LGBTQ+ individuals often lack access to information about the health and mental health challenges they face, Androphy explains. Meanwhile, clinicians tend to have less training on these issues, since they are not built into the medical curriculum. “And LGBTQ+ people are often low-income, so are underinsured and uninsured at higher rates,” says Androphy.
Nor is the problem only one of access. As she interviewed hundreds of people about their experiences of various types of health care, Androphy heard disturbing stories. “Many spoke about feeling like they had to educate their clinician before they could get help,” she says. “Explaining your identity and why what you’re struggling with is a real issue takes valuable time out of a therapy session or doctor’s appointment.”
She also heard people describe feeling that providers either did not take their problems seriously or were judging them. “They could sense a shift in how they were treated by the provider after speaking about their identity,” she explains. And while rarer, some recalled times when providers had expressed outright homophobia or transphobia.
A negative experience with a clinician takes its toll. It can deter those who need services from seeking them again. Combined with lack of LGBTQ-specific health education and misinformation about gender-affirming health and sexual care, this leads to LGBTQ people being 2.6 times more likely to report a negative health experience that made them less likely to seek care, according to KFF, the health policy research nonprofit.
All this highlights the urgency of finding better solutions, which is what motivated Androphy to build Allswell. “I can’t change systematic homophobia and transphobia in the medical profession,” she says. “But I can make a difference by starting small with something I believe can have a big impact.”
The Solution
In offering virtual group-therapy sessions, Androphy and her team are tackling many problems at the same time. First, they are addressing the cost barrier: Group sessions enable Allswell to offer participants therapy at a price five times lower than a one-to-one session.
Given provider knowledge gaps when it comes to LGBTQ-specific mental health care, the group format also has the advantage of scale, making it possible for one therapist to serve many people at the same time (Allswell’s current group number is eight).
Unrestricted by physical location, virtual sessions also make it possible to bring together groups of patients who share the same specific problem and who would otherwise struggle to find specialized care. “The power of technology means that people from various parts of a state can be in the same therapy group,” Androphy explains.
Of course, clinicians must be qualified to practice in a certain state. However, they can have licenses in multiple states. So while, at this early stage in its development, Allswell is running groups in single states — California and North Carolina — in the long term this could be expanded across the US.
For Androphy, one of the biggest advantages of the Allswell model is its ability to tackle a problem experienced by many in the LGBTQ+ community: isolation. “LGBTQ+ people experience loneliness at a higher rate than the general population,” she says. “A lot of the therapists we’ve spoken to are excited about the group model as a way to build support networks that help people feel less lonely.”
The Innovator
Social innovators often take paths that diverge more than once before finding their north star. This was not the case for Androphy, whose professional and life experiences have all led her to Allswell. “I’ve been involved with a lot of different support groups and advocacy efforts over the years,” she says.
It was something she first encountered at the University of Pennsylvania through involvement with its LGBT Center. Later, as a Penn student, she chaired the undergraduate LGBTQ+ group and wrote her honors thesis about 1950s gay political organizations.
Working in New York and Seattle after graduating, she started helping young people navigate their personal and professional journeys. For example, she volunteered alongside Connor as conference director at Out for Undergrad (O4U), a nonprofit that runs conferences that help high-performing college students to meet their professional and personal goals.
After moving to Seattle, she quickly began volunteering weekly with an organization called Lambert House, which provides a drop-in program, hot meals, and other services to LGBTQ+ youth and young adults in the Seattle area. During the pandemic, she began running a virtual support group for Lambert House participants aged 18-22.
Through this group and the drop-in center, she saw the potential for the right kind of support to transform emotional wellbeing. While helping young adults find community and build life skills, she also learned about the things young LGBTQ+ people were struggling with — everything from loneliness and challenging family relationships to difficulties finding housing and securing a first job. “For me, that experience was foundational,” she says.
While volunteering at Lambert House over the course of several years, Androphy reflected on the ways in which members of the LGBTQ+ community face different challenges depending on their socioeconomic status and access to resources. “Many of the people I was working with at Lambert House had no safety net,” she says. “Many were struggling to navigate the world as a person who is very marginalized.”
Androphy’s commitment to advocacy and LGBTQ support continued at GSB, where her extracurricular activities were with campus organizations such as Pride and the Impact Fund, where she focused on health equity and led a health care deal team. She led a global study trip to South Africa focused on structural inequality. And she spent her summer internship at Evernow, which is working to close the gap in menopause care.
Given her experience in health care and her relentless focus on providing support for LGBTQ people, building a company to deliver better mental health services was a natural next step.
“What I’m motivated by is that I know there is demand for Allswell’s services,” she says. “No one is offering this at scale in the way we want to. That makes me believe we’ll be able to make a huge impact in the longer term.”
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