Notes from the edge of mental health and technology.

15 June 2026

There is a version of this field that lives mostly in press releases, where everything is a breakthrough and every tool is about to change everything, and the people doing the actual work are somewhere off-camera, tired. This is not that newsletter. Here is what has genuinely been on our minds:

Most digital mental health tools are still designed in one part of the world and then posted to the rest, like a parcel that does not quite fit through the letterbox. Africa, in all of this, tends to show up as a market or a statistic, and almost never as a place that ideas come from. We think that is wrong, and we think, slowly, it is changing. Last week the Mental Health Data Prize Africa held its final convening in Mombasa: ten teams, funded and built from within the region, with people who have lived experience in the room from the first day rather than wheeled in at the end to admire the finished thing. That last detail is the part that matters most, and it is the part the rest of the field still tends to treat as optional.

It is worth being honest about why this kind of work is the exception. Money in our field pools around companies that have already proven themselves somewhere comfortable, which means the places with the most need and the least existing infrastructure get built for last, if at all. Mombasa is interesting precisely because it runs the other way round. It starts from the problem rather than the market, and it deserves a good deal more attention than it is likely to get, which is part of why we are giving it some here.

If you would rather the longer read, there are three pieces from this month worth your time. Mental Health Data Prize Africa: innovation that is led from within the region picks up exactly this thread, on who gets to design these tools and why being close to the problem beats being close to capital. Sycophancy and Design: the case against agreeable machinesis about an uncomfortable overlap, that the qualities which make a chatbot feel kind are very often the same ones that make it unsafe. And Marianna Famengo wrote Movement, Emotion, and AI, on whether being told you are stressed is in any meaningful way the same as being able to do something about it. It is not.

Another thing we would love to highlight:

A great many mental health tools are being built very fast just now, with AI writing a healthy share of the code, and we actually do understand the appeal.

Speed is intoxicating and a good demo/MVP is flattering. But what we keep snagging on is what these tools quietly hold, which is some of the most private things a person will ever put into words, often from people who are very young, or frightened, or both. Security in software built that quickly tends to become tomorrow's problem, an afterthought. The trouble with a security flaw is that it stays invisible right up until the moment it is the only thing anyone can see. A leak is not a small bug in this space, it breaks the one thing the whole exchange depends on, which is the belief that it was safe to say difficult things out loud. Our honest sense is that this conversation is years behind where it ought to be.

While we are on the subject of building slowly, one project we have started keeping an eye on is SAMPO. It launched this month under Horizon Europe, and it is developing a digital programme to help prevent self-harm among young people. Four years, eight partners across six countries, and a trial of around twelve and a half thousand people before anyone is allowed to claim it works. That is more or less the opposite of shipping a wellness app over a weekend. There are no results yet, which is the honest and, to us, rather reassuring part.

One more, mainly for people like us. Founders, researchers, clinicians: we spend a genuinely unreasonable share of our lives looking at screens, frequently the very ones we keep insisting should hold other people's care more carefully.

Marianna Famengo’s piece this month: “Movement, Emotion, and AI: Rethinking How Digital Tools Shape Emotional Awareness” is partly about learning to notice what your body is telling you before a device gets there first, and that is close to impossible with a notification sitting in the corner of your eye. You can read more on our website www.nestmentalhealthtech.com.

So our one suggestion for the weekend is to shut the laptop, and then leave it shut a good while longer than feels comfortable. Whatever you are working on will keep. It nearly always does.

If any of this is useful to someone you know who is building something early and worthwhile, do forward it on. That, more than anything, is what nest is for.

Until next time, nest 🪺

nest notes occasionally touches on self-harm in a research context. If you are struggling, please reach out to someone you trust or a local crisis line.