Celebrity Yassi Pressman is thankful to the Department of Health (DOH), its sponsors and all the speakers and attendees of the National Mental Summit 2022 held at the Samsung Hall, SM Aura Premiere recently.
The television host and movie actress is part of Mind You, an online platform with the vision and mission to “provide accessible and affordable mental health support” for communities and individuals anywhere and anytime in the Philippines.
Mind You’s mission and vision is to help 1,000,000 Filipinos overcome stress, anxiety and depression by the year 2025.
During the pandemic in 2021, after finding out about the mission and vision of Mind You, Pressman invested together with other angel investors as part of the Seed Funding round when the company had a P250 million (USD5 million) valuation. After a year, the valuation of Mind You increased to P1.25 billion (USD 25 million) as a result of a surge in client retention rate and revenue growth. This growth is going to grow larger as Mind You launched the Mind You app at the National Health Summit last week.
Pressman launched the app during the National Mental Health Summit to a hybrid audience (face to face and online) of 75,000 people. Her voice shaking and on the verge of tears, she introduced the app for the first time, “Sometimes we really need someone to talk to and I am so happy that this is happening…alam nilang safe sila, alam nilang hindi sila i-ju-judge….alam nila na ok kaya kong i-unload lahat ito dito sa taong ito because this person’ responsibility is only to take care of my well-being, and mahirap yun pag pamilya o kaibigan dahil natatakot tayo, now we have the opportunity to have this app that will hopefully help so many Filipinos and most importantly save lives.”
The Mind You is a free app you can download from the app store for Iphone users and from Google Play for Android users. It contains a mood tracker and a guided journal because sometimes we don’t really know what we're going through until we talk about it and write about. Mind You also has a resource center, community forums so you can learn, feel empowered or just be heard. The best part of this app is that you can speak with any of Mind You’s licensed psychologists that specialize in different areas and allows you to choose a psychologist that best suits you.
The profitability of the company is the last of Pressman’s concerns, her investment in this company is a passion project for her.
During her recent interviews, she told the media, “I want to leave this world one day na alam kong mayroon akong nagawang maganda na hindi lang sa trabaho….I think artists like me really want to do that through our art, but this was a different space. Mind You goes beyond that.”
In a recent podcast with Liza Soberano, Pressman admitted to her fans that before Mind You, she had anxiety attacks after her father passed away and getting help in a “safe space” helped overcome her anxiety attacks. “It would get really bad sometimes, to the point where it’s normal for your muscles to be so tense that you can’t move… I felt that I was gonna have a stroke….So it started in my fingers, I couldn’t move my fingers then it was my arms, because I was so tired from, I guess, shouting and getting everything out of crying. I couldn't breathe and my lungs were tired. My legs didn’t move, and my stomach was so tight.”