Thrive Together: When Parents Are the Intervention, with Mallika Reddy Pajjuri (Psyche Care)

In this video episode of Thrive Together, hosts Maya Enista Smith and Jason Lehmbeck speak with Mallika Reddy Pajjuri, Co-Founder and CEO of Psyche Care, a peer coach platform that helps families take a child home after a mental health crisis and keep them well. Psyche Care pairs families leaving a crisis with parents who have been through it themselves, through telehealth coaching, daily text check-ins, and short-form video built for the months between clinical visits. 

Mallika is a Thrive Center Fellow, and the conversation traces how her own journey with a chronic illness diagnosis as a young adult shaped a model that puts relationships, not a new clinic, at the center of care.

Mallika and her co-founder spent a year interviewing parents, legal guardians, and caregivers before building anything. What they heard was not a request for more therapists. Caregivers who had been navigating the system for years wanted to feel heard, and they trusted people who had been there before. 

So Psyche Care built for that: a first session focused on what a parent can do in the next 60 minutes, a safety plan for the home, and practical steps for school, siblings, and partners. In a pilot at MedStar Montgomery, connected through the Thrive Fellowship, the team reports that roughly 85 to 90 percent of eligible families completed an intake call from the inpatient program. 

In one cohort of 20 families discharged from an inpatient program, the group recorded 54 emergency department visits and 294 inpatient days in the year before Psyche, and 5 emergency department visits and 24 inpatient days since.

For questions, comments, or ideas for future episodes, please email us at: thrivecenter@georgetown.edu .

Interview Excerpt

(Edited for length)

Jason: The default move for tech-enabled mental health platforms right now is to put a clinician in the center. You and your team chose to put a parent at the center. Why?

Mallika: When we were talking to caregivers, it wasn’t necessarily that they wanted therapists. If anything, we were talking to parents and legal guardians who have been through this journey for five, 10, 15 years, who have become exhausted with explaining their story to clinicians that don’t get it. They just said that they wanted to feel heard and to feel supported. Caregivers truly trusted individuals who have been there before and wanted to hear what worked, what didn’t work, and things that they can actually try in the home environment to keep their child under the same roof. It is still critical to involve clinicians. We’re still anchoring on evidence-based tools and having clinicians inform our product development. However, the way that the product feels, takes shape, and is delivered is truly informed by caregiver experience.

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