Bringing mental health tools to startup culture

This week is mental health week in Canada, and many industries have stepped up to ensure that the emotional and mental well-being of employees is a priority.

Arguably, however, the tech sector, with its hard-driving, work-at-all-hours startup culture, has lagged behind in recognizing the importance of mental health.

Abdullah Snobar aims to address that. Snobar is the executive director of the DMZ startup accelerator at Ryerson University, which recently took on a tech-focused mental-health service called "Inkblot," which has also joined the DMZ as a startup.

He joined Nora Young in the Spark  studio.

You have this tension between understanding that mental health is part of what makes a company sustainable over a long time, but also just the very real pressures of a startup: it's a private company, maybe you don't have health insurance. How do you manage that?

The nature of everything now is that people are coming in, and they're having all these pressures that are put on them, but they don't really know where to turn if they actually need to talk about these things.

From our end we've actually partnered up with a company that's called Inkblot, and what it's offering is 24-hour, very convenient counseling, coaching and therapy support that's done from the comfort of your own home or office space. They are a startup themselves, but they've really figured out a massive gap in the in the ecosystem, which is how do we get people to have access to these kinds of support services beyond going to an office in the traditional means of what it used to be.

I actually used it for myself. I went just to really see what it's all about and they gave me a level of comfort which I never imagined.

The person on the other side understood what was going on. You start to realize and create a lot more understanding that you're not the only one, and maybe there are others that are going through similar things—and it's okay.

Overall, how would you like to see the conversation about mental health in the tech and entrepreneurial sector change?

We all have a role to play. Whether you're going to be the founder yourself, or whether you're going to be the employee going to an incubator. Joining a startup, we all have a perspective that we bring to the table from our end. I'd love to see a lot more incubators and accelerator programs who are supporting the future of this country, being able to actually look at mental health in a very serious context and actually try to build at the right services and platforms for people to speak up and be supported.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity. Click the listen button above to hear the full conversation.

Click here to see mental-health resources that are being promoted during Canadian Mental Health Week.