GSB student takes new approach to treating eating disorders
Content warning: This article contains references to eating disorders and suicide.
Mehek Mohan MBA ’25 built Kahani, an app designed to treat eating disorders, because people still aren’t paying enough attention to one of psychiatry’s deadliest issues, she said.
“Not enough people care about this space, [yet] statistically, everyone knows someone with an eating disorder,” Mohan, who studied molecular and cellular biology at Berkeley and then led product teams at Genentech, said.
Kahani clinical advisor and professor of psychiatry, Kristine Luce, highlighted another stark challenge. There is roughly only one trained eating disorder clinician for every 10,000 patients, Luce said. Eating disorders are especially stigmatized and under-resourced, yet these cultural and infrastructural challenges affect the entire field of mental health, she said.
During the 2020 pandemic, Mohan said that one of her closest friends nearly passed away from eating disorder-related complications. Her struggle to access effective treatment was a profound “wake-up call,” Mohan said.
Last summer, she partnered with her friend and technical co-founder, Brandon Chaffee, to begin building an eating disorder tool for patients in between clinician visits, when patients need “the most support,” Mohan said. She brainstormed with friends as well as her clinical advisors, Luce and Stanford psychiatry professor Eric Stice.
“We never thought we were going to build a game,” Mohan said. She described the user experience as “’Inside Out’ meets Farmville meets Duolingo.”
Mohan studied which elements kept mobile users most engaged with their apps. Building on these insights, Mohan and Chaffee made Kahani a game where users grow and nurture gardens. Kahani users plant flowers in their gardens by completing certain tasks, which Mohan hopes creates a space for users to invest in their recovery. They can visit other gardens and give compliments and gifts, which develops a “community space for healing,” Mohan said.
Kahani’s first cohort recently completed their initial pilot, finding that 34 people with various eating disorders used Kahani a median of five minutes per day, with some using it several hours every day, according to Mohan.
Though Mohan originally expected teens would benefit the most from the Farmville game style, patient ages ranged from 16 to 68, with a median age of 31. The team is currently enrolling Kahani’s second cohort for another six-week program.
Though Mohan said she may eventually pursue clinical trials for potential Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approval, she emphasized that it is not essential for Kahani’s initial growth and revenue. Finch, another app that takes a game-approach but for Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD), has millions of downloads and sells a $40 premium annual subscription.
A host of insurance-focused, digital therapeutic apps for mental health disorders have emerged since the pandemic and raised hundreds of millions of dollars. Still, promising businesses, including San Francisco’s Pear Therapeutics, have gone bankrupt.
Insurance companies have been reluctant to cover the costs of mobile health apps — even FDA-approved ones. However, Mohan believes Kahani can utilize an existing insurance billing code that provides a high likelihood of reimbursement without requiring costly FDA approval.
As the mental health crisis continues to exact a toll, some clinicians say patients need not only better tools, but potentially better models. Luce and Stice are open-minded about the possibilities Kahani holds.
“If it has potential to increase access to eating disorder care,” Luce said, “I’m always hopeful.”
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