In this interview, Anne Wanlund, CEO of Canopie, shares how her company is working to change approaches to maternal mental health.
Photo by Hollie Santos on Unsplash
Maternal Mental Health and Canopie
Having a baby brings a multitude of changes to a mother’s life. For nearly 80% of moms, that includes struggling with mental health — the most common postpartum challenge, which can lead to long-term social and financial difficulties for families and communities. Additionally, expecting and new mothers with mental health challenges face numerous barriers when it comes to getting the care they need: unpredictable schedules, lack of access to providers, and time constraints. Overcoming these challenges and connecting them early on with mental health support can improve their well-being as well as that of their child.
Sorenson Impact Institute’s impact investing team is always on the lookout for companies with innovative solutions for social and economic well-being. Among our recent additions is Canopie, which works with healthcare providers to connect expecting and new moms with evidence-based care, as well as remote screening, monitoring, and referral services. Canopie’s “treatment as prevention” digital platform includes personal stories from real parents and tips for managing common parenting obstacles, including balancing work and maintaining a sense of identity. It also connects parents in crisis to emergency support.
We spoke with Anne Wanlund, CEO of Canopie, about how the company is working with providers, nonprofit organizations, and government programs to change approaches to maternal mental health, connect families with resources and care, and reduce long-term personal and financial costs. The idea for Canopie stemmed from Anne’s experience with mental health issues as an expecting mother working in Tanzania and her desire to support other women as they navigate early motherhood.
Interview with Anne Wanlund
Can you share how Canopie builds on your professional experience in public health and personal experience as a new mother?
Anne Wanlund: Especially in the early days of Canopie, I felt like I was seeing the moms served by the East Africa-based organizations I led through new eyes. We didn’t know about postpartum psychosis or the ways in which postpartum depression and other maternal mental health conditions would influence bonding and feeding, for example.
While those organizations focused on maternal and child health and nutrition, through my research and my own experience building Canopie, I began to understand how mental health is woven into every aspect of maternal health, well-being, and child health — and how much more can be done in public health interventions if we acknowledge the impact of maternal mental health. My biggest learnings have been gaining an understanding of the shared experiences of motherhood across cultures worldwide and how deeply mental health shapes all aspects of maternal health and well-being. Those two learnings deeply influence how I think about maternal mental health — everything about motherhood is interrelated.
How did you work with providers to advance Canopie from an idea to an entrepreneurial reality that connects users with evidence-based mental health services?
AW: There is an extensive evidence base for what therapeutic frameworks are most effective for expecting and new mothers, and providers were a huge part of understanding why and how to deliver the benefits of therapy while also overcoming the parts of therapy that are intrinsically barriers for many at-risk moms — like time, stigma, shame, childcare, logistics, worrying about the person passing judgment. The good news about maternal health is that there are so many opportunities for a provider, whether it be upstream (OBGYNs) or downstream (pediatricians), to introduce the benefits of getting support. These touchpoints can also be missed opportunities because, for example, you’re relying on a good provider relationship and a point in time when motherhood changes every second of every day. Providers were crucial to understanding why and how specific interventions work and what barriers exist to identifying and delivering mental health support.
Tell us about your funding journey. How did Sorenson Impact support your goals?
AW: First, I can’t say enough good things about Sorenson. Your diligence process was one of the best and most rigorous I’ve experienced. By the end, I felt like your team knew our business as well as we do, and you asked questions that gave me confidence you knew how and why I was making decisions about our business. For me, the most important thing has been working with funders who were not going to pressure Canopie to work in a way that ran contrary to our values around health equity and impact. Our funders all understand that Canopie is a means to an end: fully upending the way we approach maternal mental health, eventually making maternal health 100% focused on outcomes, and bringing joy to motherhood. This approach has meant that we’ve raised funds from philanthropy, impact-focused venture capitalists, maternal health strategic partners, and mental health-focused funds. All in all, we’ve raised close to $4 million to date.
For me, who we take funding from is as important as who we haven’t taken money from. I’ve had many conversations with investors who said they’d invest if we changed our business model, often in ways that would have us benefiting from a system of misaligned incentives. But then we’d end up in a “neither here nor there” place, and it would be much harder to stay focused on our mission.
How can digital products like Canopie help meet growing needs for mental health care and create a more equitable and sustainable health care system?
AW: Good digital products enable and enhance meaningful human connections, whether that’s with providers, other moms, or your partner. Everything Canopie does is meant to help you live a more compassionate, connected life and promote care-seeking behaviors. That said, another big benefit of digital tools like Canopie is our ability to deliver a “treatment as prevention” approach. Most maternal mental health conditions are preventable! By using a digital platform and not relying on providers for preventative care, we can decrease the cost of care and improve outcomes — all while decreasing the burden on scarce behavioral health providers who can focus on complex, higher-acuity cases.
What barriers do mothers face when accessing perinatal care – mental and physical? What are some of the broader, long-term effects of poor maternal mental health — for families, communities, and society?
AW: Expecting and new moms are trained to prioritize their growing babies above all else. During pregnancy, that can feel like being prioritized, but reality really sets in postpartum that a new mom is nobody’s patient. In our society, unfortunately, getting mental health support can still sometimes be seen as selfish, when that couldn’t be further from the truth — postpartum depression is categorized as an Adverse Childhood Experience (ACE) because of its huge impact on children and prenatal anxiety affects a developing fetus’ brain. While providers screen for postpartum depression, they miss a lot of cases. For example, prenatal anxiety is a risk factor for depression. Anxiety rates are higher among pregnant women than the average population, and less than 20% of new moms are screened for anxiety nationally. On top of that, and especially if you already have children, the barriers to actually getting help are quite high — scheduling time between work and childcare to see someone, figuring out who takes your insurance and what you’ll end up having to pay, wondering if you might feel worse because the person you’re speaking to about such an intimate subject might not be the right fit for you, not to mention if you’re struggling to meet basic needs — the list goes on.
Can you share a real-world example from a provider/patient of the benefits of Canopie?
AW: Providers often feel like they don’t have the time, resources, or support to address an expecting or new mom’s mental health. Sometimes, they’ll have a resource list or a preferred provider but have to caveat that they don’t know whether that provider has openings or takes the patient’s insurance. This lack of resources or knowledge that the resource will actually help the mom discourages providers from even screening in the first place. For providers and moms, Canopie removes that barrier. We offer on-demand, evidence-based support right away, rolling virtual classes several times a week, and a connection to care for high-risk moms that they can schedule through the app. In fact, our first download happened at 1 a.m. — a time when no one else is awake, but you might be feeling the worst. The biggest gap we see is the lack of solutions a mom can access in the moment that expands, not limits, what’s available to her. For example, a specific provider, or a specific provider’s approach, might not appeal to that mom. But our solution was designed to accommodate people who have very different levels of comfort and preferences when it comes to how, when, and where they access care. Our goal is always to expand the support available to a mom and not make her feel stuck on one path.
Why is it important that Canopie virtual classes have a community element?
AW: While motherhood is a shared experience, it is also quite isolating, given your physical limitations, especially in the fourth trimester. Being isolated exacerbates low mood and anxiety, which perpetuates isolation, which further exacerbates low mood. You end up in a cycle. We wanted moms to feel connected in a safe, non-stigmatizing educational space and normalize some of the issues they are grappling with. You don’t need a diagnosis or a referral of any kind to attend, and that’s so critical for actually making sure people get support and are on the path to care.
What are your hopes for the future of Canopie?
AW: We are building support to connect moms across every level of risk to high-quality, inclusive, accessible care as quickly as possible, which means working with providers, non-profit organizations, and government programs. We’ve found that our greatest strengths are the trust moms have in us, their engagement throughout pregnancy and postpartum, and our impact, so we will be investing more in these areas and growing over the next few years.
Anne Wanlund is the Founder and CEO of Canopie, which is creating a safety net for expecting and new mothers focusing on mental health and wellbeing. Before Canopie, she spent years leading large teams at maternal health organizations in East Africa. She is channeling her passion for maternal health and personal experiences with mental health conditions as a new mom to address the enormous care gap for overlooked maternal populations.
Connect with Anne on LinkedIn. Follow me on Twitter or LinkedIn. Check out my website.
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