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Guests: George Goldsmith, Co-Founder & Chairman, COMPASS Pathways and Ed Bolton, Creative Director, frog London

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Design Mind frogcast Ep. 33 - A New Direction for Mental Healthcare

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On this episode, we&#8217;re talking about new solutions for mental illness. Psilocybin–the active ingredient naturally found in psychedelic magic mushrooms–is increasingly being used to help fight what is often called ‘treatment-resistant depression.&#8217; <a href="https://compasspathways.com/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">COMPASS Pathways</a> is one bold healthcare venture on a mission to fight human suffering at scale using a combination of a one-time psilocybin treatment, ongoing therapy and digital tools. To discuss this new direction for mental healthcare, we are joined by COMPASS Pathways Co-Founder and Chairman, George Goldsmith, as well as Ed Bolton, Creative Director of Brand in frog London. George and his team at COMPASS Pathways worked with frog to communicate their story and carve a new category for investors and patients alike. 
Listen to the podcast episode and read the full transcripts below. You can also find us on <a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/design-mind-frogcast/id1541644073">Apple Podcasts</a>, <a href="https://open.spotify.com/show/5mxbuRY6KtBwIrNhWhu0sx">Spotify</a>  and anywhere you listen to podcasts. 
Learn more about the collaboration from our <a href="https://www.frog.co/work/forging-a-new-path-for-mental-health">COMPASS Pathways case study</a>.

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[20:00] Elizabeth Wood: Now back to our show. Next up, you’re going to hear from Ed Bolton, Creative Director of Brand in frog’s London studio. Ed was part of a multidisciplinary team working together to communicate the value of COMPASS Pathways for investors and patients alike. Here’s Ed now.
[20:17] Ed Bolton: Ultimately, what we wanted to do with this piece of work is to change minds by creating a new category with an innovative care model. That&#8217;s the combination of the compound, therapy and digital tools. And through that combination, we really want to try and stop suffering at scale and take on the mental healthcare crisis. My name&#8217;s Ed Bolton. I&#8217;m a Creative Director of Brand at frog.
[20:40] Ed Bolton: What&#8217;s rewarding about working with a company focusing on ending the suffering and the mental health crisis is that the more you start to think about it, the more you realize how mental health affects everybody. And everybody has a story, whether it&#8217;s a personal story or a family member or a friend who is suffering at some point from mental health issues. So being able to be part of a journey which is looking at innovative ways of solving the mental healthcare crisis was personally and professionally very rewarding for me and the team.
[21:12] Elizabeth Wood: Like many new to psilocybin therapies, the frog team had to become more familiar with the nature of psilocybin-based treatment, and absorb some hard truths about the enormous number of people who suffer from depression worldwide.
[21:26] Ed Bolton: There are lots of misconceptions about psilocybin treatment. I think a lot of people think it&#8217;s people running around the woods eating magic mushrooms and the psychedelic movement from the 1960s. This is not like that at all. It&#8217;s very rigorous. The important part is that it&#8217;s therapy-backed. So the therapist works with the patient and really understands the issues of trauma, where depression comes from.
[21:48] Ed Bolton: I learned a lot about depression during this program of work. 320 million people live with depression globally and 30% of them are not helped by first and second line treatments. They are diagnosed with what&#8217;s known as ‘treatment-resistant’ depression. It was really interesting to listen to George talking about this because it&#8217;s not the patients who are resisting the treatment and it&#8217;s not the drugs that are resisting the treatment. It&#8217;s a term given to people who have been failed by the usual healthcare pathways. And so really understanding this group and how often treatment-resistant depression people lead to suicide became a really interesting mission.
[22:24] Elizabeth Wood: Over the course of the program, the team learned a lot from the COMPASS Pathways team about the scale of the crisis they are trying to solve, which they then used to tell the venture’s story.
[22:34] Ed Bolton: We had a really impressive team working on COMPASS Pathways. It was a great mix of creatives such as designers, copywriters, visualizers, animators, alongside an impressive bunch of strategists who looked at the commercial strategy alongside the brand strategy, and also thinking of how we can articulate the innovative care pathway model.
[22:54] Ed Bolton: It&#8217;s great working with this type of client. You get to have conversations directly with the founder which influences your work, and there&#8217;s a real hunger from their side to achieve something. This is innovative unknown territory with the ultimate aim of getting these types of compounds approved by the FDA for the use of treatment of mental illnesses. So this is a personal mission. There&#8217;s a real mission here to achieve something.
[23:15] Ed Bolton: We know that people really suffer with depression, not from depression. And for many of these people, depression never goes away. It stays with them for the rest of their lives. When we learned about the high number of people with depression worldwide, we started to think about why. And there was a number of reasons that came up. Even though mental health is more widely talked about today, which is fantastic, there are many communities around the world which hide it from their friends and family because it&#8217;s seen as a shameful thing.
[23:42] Ed Bolton: A really important heartwarming moment for me was listening to the COMPASS Pathways leadership team talking about their own personal experiences of mental health. Whether it was their family members or themselves, everybody within COMPASS Pathways has a story, and in some cases some people have come out of retirement to join COMPASS Pathways on their mission.
[24:00] Elizabeth Wood: One result of the program was a communications campaign called “Everybody has a story.” Ed shared how the frog and COMPASS Pathways team landed on this platform, and what they were trying to achieve with its message.
[24:13] Ed Bolton: When we were working with COMPASS Pathways, we focused on creating a really robust commercial strategy for the business to look at increasing their investment overall. But equally important was focusing on the human suffering behind mental health. “Everybody has a story” was a line that George would mention in some of our meetings and it started to grow on us. We began to create some communications for it.
[24:27] Ed Bolton: “Everybody has a story” became a platform to get the human stories out there, the real suffering. We worked with a psilocybin patient called Kirk and did a documentary, or mini- documentary of him, in his friend&#8217;s house, talking very powerfully about his experience with treatment-resistant depression that was brought on by the death of his mother. How he suffered from it, how he started to find it very, very difficult to live with. He then did the therapy-backed psilocybin treatment and while it didn&#8217;t cure him, it gave him a completely different outlook on life. It gave him the tools and the processes to deal with his depression. It&#8217;s a really powerful two-minute documentary and we hope to do more of them because we really believe everybody has a story.
[25:19] Ed Bolton: When we decided to make the mini-documentary of Kirk, we first started off by jumping on a Zoom call and discussing with Kirk about how comfortable he would be talking about his experience. It’s obviously very personal. It&#8217;s very traumatic. So we wanted him to be comfortable with discussing these things on camera. He was incredibly warm.He was really up for it. He even suggested filming at his friend Anthea&#8217;s house. On the day, we worked with our production partner to turn up at the house, where we created the right type of backdrops. We spent the whole morning just interviewing Kirk. It was a really, really powerful testimony. Raakhi, the copywriter on the team, sat with him in the room. Everyone else left, and she spent two to three hours just talking to him about his experience. And by the end of it, everybody was in tears because it was such a powerful personal recollection of his experience with depression.
[26:14] Elizabeth Wood: The short documentary the team put a personal focus on a profound social problem. You can find a link in today’s show notes to the frog and COMPASS Pathways case study to see the video for yourself.
[26:25] Ed Bolton: The ultimate aim of the video was to show that everyone has a story. We showed it on their Investor Day to show the human side of what COMPASS Pathways is doing to connect it to the investor information that goes along with it. Part of our work was to look at COMPASS Pathways and create a new brand expression for them. We came across this idea of a graphic which represents the mind of a psilocybin patient, how we can start to influence and move and morph interesting graphical ways. And that became the cornerstone of our visual approach. Our work had a profound effect on their Investor Day. There was a 340% increase in investor inquiries about COMPASS Pathways from investors and there was a 33% increase in website traffic on the day.
[27:07] Elizabeth Wood: For the team, Investor Day was just one important step on the path toward expanding COMPASS Pathways’ reach–and not a moment too soon. The work is all in service of treating depression and other mental illnesses in new, deeply effective ways.
[27:22] Ed Bolton: Our generation is finally breaking down the stigma around mental health, but we are still just scratching the surface, especially around the serious mental illnesses such as PTSD, treatment-resistant depression, PTSD and anorexia.
[27:36] Ed Bolton: For me, I think the role of creative storytelling is really important in today&#8217;s businesses. It&#8217;s a way to understand information which really resonates with customers, audiences and in this case patients–to be able to communicate things which could be quite complicated, that don&#8217;t always resonate on a human level, and being able to attach it to a story which can really cut through.
[27:55] Ed Bolton: Throughout this project, I had the words of frog’s founder Hartmut Esslinger in my mind. He said that “form follows emotion” and it&#8217;s the idea that we can create things, whether they&#8217;re experiences or products or whatever it is, but they need to have an emotional connection to the customer. That was a really powerful insight on how we started to link the business model with the innovative thinking and the emotional side of what COMPASS Pathways does. We&#8217;re really looking forward to continuing the relationship with COMPASS Pathways and being a partner as they grow.
[28:26] Elizabeth Wood: That’s our show. The Design Mind frogcast was brought to you by frog, a leading global creative consultancy that is part of Capgemini Invent. Check today’s show notes for transcripts and more from our conversation.
[28:38] Elizabeth Wood: We really want to thank George Goldsmith and the team at COMPASS Pathways for sharing the story of the important work they do to fight mental illness at scale. Check today’s show notes for a link to the COMPASS Pathways site, for more on the work in the case study, and to see the short documentary titled “Kirk’s Story.” Thank you also to Ed Bolton, Creative Director at frog UK, and the rest of the frogs who helped bring this important work to life.
[29:00] Elizabeth Wood: We also want to thank you, dear listener. If you like what you heard, tell your friends. Rate and review to help others find us on <a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/design-mind-frogcast/id1541644073" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Apple Podcasts</a> and  <a href="https://open.spotify.com/show/5mxbuRY6KtBwIrNhWhu0sx" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Spotify</a> . And be sure to follow us wherever you listen to podcasts. Find lots more to think about from our global frog team at <a href="https://www.frog.co/designmind" target="_blank" rel="noopener">frog.co/designmind</a>. That’s frog.co. Follow frog on Twitter at <a href="https://twitter.com/frogdesign" target="_blank" rel="noopener">@frogdesign</a> and <a href="https://www.instagram.com/frog_design/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">@frog_design</a> on Instagram. And if you have any thoughts about the show, we’d love to hear from you. Reach out at <a href="https://www.frog.co/contact" target="_blank" rel="noopener">frog.co/contact</a>. Thanks for listening. Now go <a href="https://www.frog.co/make-your-mark" target="_blank" rel="noopener">make your mark</a>.

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Design Mind frogcast Ep. 33 - A New Direction for Mental Healthcare