Hello dear reader,
Spring has come to my city. The birds are back, baby leaves on trees, flowers bloom aplenty and sappy as it may be, I’ve been humming “This could be the start, of something new, it feels so right, to be here with you, oh-oh”.
On the same beat of something new, I write in a new format today, one that you haven’t read from me thus far. I have with me today an assortment of mini-essays.
These essays differ on topics yet have a thorough-line making them all belong together. Read them and tell me, do you see the thorough-line that I’m seeing?
On New Jobs For Therapists
Over the last two weeks I conducted an experiment. I set up a job reminder for key words such as “Clinical product specialist”, “Clinical AI Red-teaming”, “Clinical Domain Expert for AI”.
LinkedIn pinged me everyday with some 10-15 recommendations. A total of 100 recommendations, out of which 10ish were decently meaningful. Here are my observations and predictions:
- Ten, years ago, therapy job postings were about contact hours, modalities, and billing. Five years ago, teletherapy added a screen. Now, the clinician is being asked to train and correct the intelligence itself, not simply use it.
- Terms like ‘benchmark responses,’ ‘model limitations,’ and ‘evaluation methodology’ would have been completely foreign to a therapy job description a decade ago are here.
- In this kind of job setup, strong written communication is a core clinical skill and expectation.
- Contractor arrangements are more predominantly available over staff roles. Organizations are still figuring out how to institutionalize this work.
- Per hour rates fluctuate enough to suggests a market that hasn’t finished pricing this work yet.
- Roles can be academic forward (think developing gold standards), tech forward (closer to a product manager-ish role), regulatory forward (think fluency with HIPAA/GDPR/DPDP, validating model output).
- Some job descriptions read like a conventional clinical content job with one line about mobile or web apps added. Not every mental healthcare AI job is actually an AI job.
- “Clinical AI evaluator” will become a recognized profession with certifications and associations similar to the way UX researcher did as software matured. Before Google comes up with a course, we did it first.
- Graduate programs will add AI literacy tracks. Dual-credential candidates will command a significant premium. As with most things, western universities will do this first before south asian ones take the cue.
- Mental Health Tech 1.0 was all about marketplaces and recruiting therapists as therapists. MhTech 2.0 is here, recruiting therapists as tech team members.
On Therapists With Foresight
This week I had orientation 1-on-1 conversations with participants of Cohort #2 of Applied Product Thinking for Therapists. I want to share with you some amazing attributes of therapists who have foresight:
- They’re diversifying beyond their strengths, and that’s healthy
You’d expect a burnout from therapeutic work to signal ‘rest more, set better limits.’ Instead, to therapists with foresight, it signals as diagnostic data about a structural ceiling in the clinical industry. I see it as a very rational response to a broken economic model that is the business of being a full time therapist.
- They all have builder experience and don’t realise how rare that is Nearly every person in this cohort has already built or contributed to building something: a peer support platform, a training curriculum, a chatbot and user flows, a full website, excel tools, customer support triage framework, mental health guidelines for city municipality. What makes them stand apart is a matter of being able to articulate how they’ve contributed to building.
- Unanimously, all therapists who want to diversify also want to retain their clinical practice. The expected narrative is “I want out of therapy, this job is unsustainable”. The actual pattern: seeking a hybrid model. Everyone who builds wants to retain clinical work not just as a credibility anchor, but also because they care deeply about their role as therapists.
- Nobody is asking “should I do this?”, they’re asking “how to?” Therapists are trained to sit with ambivalence. Therapists with foresight already resolve the ambivalence of if they should expand beyond their clinical practice. The psychological work isn’t about deciding, it’s about legitimising and putting into action a decision already made.
- They already hold a powerful lens, they ask “should this exist?” That’s a clinical ethics lens applied to product evaluation . An untrained eye would see this as gatekeeping. But in product terms, it’s a rare capability: they’re essentially a pre-market clinical risk assessor. That’s a job title that doesn’t exist yet but will, very soon.
On Evaluating Ideas
People come to me with ideas all the time. Every week I have at least one conversation on a product/ service concept in mental health innovation. The question I am asked always is:
Do you think this will work? Do you think I should go all in and build it?
To everyone, I ask in return:
Are you in a phase of life that is conducive to entrepreneurship?
The thing is, mental health innovation is a niche industry. We’re in it’s first of many decades of existence, a blue ocean market, untouched by big-tech and a low/no priority portfolio for most big name VC funds.
At such a cusp of breakthrough, what matters more than the product/ service idea itself is if you can build trust with the audience.
As you already know, building trust is a long term process. And so when evaluating a good idea, I’m compelled to ask the person if they in turn are in a place to commit at least 3 years to the cause, if not more.
Because ideas come and go, they iterate and evolve, but those who are in a position to commit long to make this evolution happen are the only ones who stand a chance to make a living out of this, and a make meaningful difference.
On Mechanisation vs. Crafts
Mentions of OpenAI’s Codex, Claude Design, and Figma Make entered my conversations this week. Friends and past colleagues from the tech industry vented about how these tools are contributing to sky high expectations coupled with fast plummeting standard of quality of output.
Tangential but very related – last two weeks I’ve been watching two period drama TV shows: The Medici by Franz Spotnitz (of The Man in the High Castle fame) and Nicholas Meyer (of Star Trek fame), and the second show Labyrinth produced by Tony and Ridley Scott (of The Gladiator fame).
I’m a huge period drama and by extension, history fiend. I think we can look to history to seek answers and patterns for most of our problems. Apart from being educational, I turn to history because gosh can it be so very entertaining!
This whole situation—machines taking on a lot of tasks previously only possible through talented, highly trained people—is unmistakably similar to the disruption of the artisan system of labour upon the onset of mechanisation in the early 1800s.
What holds my attention is the fact that hand-made, slow built objects and offerings have survived despite 200+ years of machine production. We continue to hold Botticelli’s, Brunelleschi’s, Michelangelo’s and all the other geniuses’ works to very high regards. We continue to treasure that one piece of hand-made jewellery passed down from a family member.
We still enjoy the labour of creating and consuming crafted objects, and in the process build genuine connection with people. So maybe, just maybe, there’s an argument to be made to keep the craftsperson in us alive.
Take care and see you soon,
Harshali
Founder, TinT
Follow along on @be_tint
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