Building for the Broken: My Work at the Intersection of Tech and Mental Health

I am Kat Jost, a purpose-driven technologist based in Philadelphia, working by day in the corporate tech world and spending the rest of my time building things for the public good. As someone profoundly impacted by mental health challenges at a young age, I have made it my life's mission to use my skills and lived experience to lessen the burden for others. Sometimes that means offering the simple gesture of listening quietly and actively to a coworker going through a tough time. Sometimes it means launching companies and products.

This post is a rare attempt to sit still long enough to document some of that work. It's Mental Health Awareness Month, and if any of this inspires someone else to build something (anything) then it's worth the time it took to write it.

Skilled Not Ill

My first attempt at building something to combat the mental health crisis was Skilled Not Ill, a mental health social club I founded in Center City, Philadelphia in 2018. The goal was to make mental health and wellbeing practices feel "cool," low-pressure, and casually obtainable, which they were historically not. I held one-hour, small-group meetups several times per week, with each one focusing on a different mental wellness skill. Skills ranged from DBT to CBT to Positive Psychology, among other methodologies. We would discuss the skill, engage in a game or activity, and socialize. The largest customer segment was made up of young professionals in the area who were looking to do something healthy and different and be around like-minded people; people who cared about their mental health but weren't in crisis. At the highest point, I had a community of over 900 members.

You're going to ask: How did I become proficient enough in these mental health skills to teach them? Let's just say I'd had years and years of first-hand training prior to this endeavor, and I knew them so well I could recite each and every one of them in my sleep, in charades, in Spanish…take your pick.

The best lessons I learned from running Skilled Not Ill were:

• Don't try to do everything by yourself.
• Don't let people volunteer to work for you for free. It always leads to resentment, no matter how good the intentions are on both sides.
• Don't try to incorporate every single customer's feedback; listen to it and gather a substantial amount so you can look for patterns before making decisions.
• Don't try to be everything for everyone. Pick your niche. Otherwise, you become nothing for no one.
• Don't quit your day job. A business that doesn't make money is a hobby, not a business.
• Startups and small businesses are not the same thing. A startup means you're aiming for scale.
• Know when to throw in the towel. Failure is a good thing. It's even better when it's fast.

I shut down Skilled Not Ill in January of 2020, right before the pandemic, because I ran out of money and because I hit a wall in trying to figure out exactly what I was trying to build. As an in-person events-based business, it wouldn't have survived the pandemic anyway. It was fate.

I still think about Skilled Not Ill from time to time, and I still think something like it is necessary for the good of the public in this fight against mental health challenges. Maybe someday someone will pick up this idea and run with it in their own way. That is my hope.

Balancer

My next attempt at combatting the mental health crisis was a free and open-source web application called Balancer. Balancer was a Code for Philly project that I pitched and subsequently recruited a team for. It was for prescribers who treat patients with bipolar disorder, and it used AI to help them determine the best medication based on patient characteristics and public peer-reviewed medical journals.

At the time of writing this, patients with bipolar disorder take between 2 to 10 years on average and 3 to 30 medication combinations to reach stability in medication, according to the International Bipolar Foundation, and there are more than 60 medications on the market for bipolar disorder. Without medication, patients can experience extremely debilitating highs and lows in their mood. I picked bipolar because it's one of the hardest mental health-related brain disorders to treat successfully. Why not start with the hardest, right?

To build Balancer based on evidence, I partnered with the University of Pennsylvania's professor of psychiatry and conducted user experience (UX) research interviews with him and several residents in the program throughout 2023. I also interviewed private practice psychiatrists, nurse practitioners, and physician assistants.

It took over 2.5 years and 100+ volunteer technologists to build the Minimum Viable Product (MVP), or the first fully functional version, of Balancer. The nature of volunteer work means different team members are rolling off and on frequently, and because it takes a back seat to folks' day jobs, progress can be slow. When we started building Balancer, no one was doing what we were doing. As the years passed, several new tools came out that were fully funded by venture capitalists, free, and comprehensive. They worked for every health condition; not just bipolar disorder, like ours. Gradually, our potential user base lost interest. Ultimately, time got the best of us, and we found ourselves with a product with no users. I walked away from Balancer in the beginning of 2026.

The best lessons I learned from Balancer were:

• Prioritize features ruthlessly. (My old mentor used to say this.) Only focus on the utmost important functionality and resist the bells and whistles you instinctively want to add.
• Stay in close contact with your users/customers over time. Build strong relationships with them.
• Ship in small quantities and ask for frequent feedback.
• Find what motivates each of your individual team members and use it to drive results.
• Make sure everyone on the team feels useful and appreciated. People are more productive this way, and they stick around longer. This may seem obvious, but it should always be on your mind.
• Know when to pull the plug. Trying to pump more features into an app that nobody is using is like trying to operate on a corpse. Communicate this way more gently to your team, though!

What's Next, And Why I'm Not Stopping

After these two ventures and subsequent shutdowns, I have never felt more certain that this work matters. The mental health crisis doesn't have a single, elegant solution waiting to be discovered. It's a web of systemic failures and stigmas and barriers that will require many different kinds of people building many different kinds of things over a very long period of time. No single app, club, or tool is going to fix it…but that doesn't mean we stop building.

What I've learned (mostly through failure) is that experimentation is important and teaches you something you couldn't have learned any other way. Skilled Not Ill taught me how communities form and fracture. Balancer taught me to ship fast and test often. These lessons will shape whatever I do next. I know I'll keep showing up for this problem in whatever way I can. Some problems are too important to walk away from just because they're hard.

My hope in writing this is two-fold:

• That someone reading this feels inspired to start a mental health project of their own, knowing that failure isn't actually the worst thing in the world.
• That someone reading this who may be struggling with their mental health knows that there are people out there building for you, fighting for you, and rooting for you. I am.