Requiem For a 🍐: The Tragedy of the Pear Therapeutics Bankruptcy for Suicide Prevention

How flawed payment models keep life-saving Innovation from all of us

I’m very sad about the news that Prescription Digital Theraputics company Pear Theraputics has filed for bankruptcy.

They did all the appropriate things. Years of work went into the company.

Reached for comment, their CEO said the following:

I know what you're thinking, 'cause right now I'm thinking the same thing. Actually, I've been thinking it ever since I got here: Why oh why didn't I take the BLUE pill?

—Cypher, in “The Matrix”

Sorry, wrong quote!

I wrote an article about before the bankruptcy about their Somyrst product, and now, no one can accuse me of being a shill for a bankrupt company. So with a little bit of editing for the current context, here is what I wrote:

Eulogy For Somyrst

Suicide is complicated. People kill themselves for all sorts of reasons. And mostly, we don’t get to know what those reasons were, because only a fraction of those who complete suicide leave us an explanation.

Suicide risk factors, on the other hand, are actually pretty straightforward.

Risk factors are things we can know about in advance of a rare event like completed suicide. We divide the conceptual earth into:

static risk factors that don't change

And:

dynamic risk factors that do change

Dynamic risk factors are either modifiable, because we can do something to change them, or not modifiable, because we can't.