July 17, 2026
I’m excited to share that I recently joined Mandy Peckham, President & CEO, BSR Consulting on Innovating for Impact: Where Bold Ideas Meet Public Purpose for an episode called “Beyond the Appointment: Technology’s Role in Mental Health.“
If you’ve read Connected Care, you already know why this conversation matters to me. If you haven’t, here’s the short version: for years, I’ve lived two parallel lives. One as a caregiver to my daughter, who lives with schizophrenia. The other as a technology leader who has spent more than three decades watching innovation transform nearly every industry except the one my family needed most.
This episode is where those two worlds finally sat down together.
The Gap Between Appointments
A psychiatric appointment might last twenty minutes. A therapy session, maybe fifty. Everything else — the 2am crisis, the missed medication, the slow slide back toward isolation, the small win nobody else sees — happens in the space between those visits. That’s the space where caregivers live. It’s also the space where I believe technology has the most unrealized potential.
In our conversation, Mandy and I dug into what that could actually look like: AI-supported tools, digital therapeutics, wearables, telehealth, virtual reality, and passive monitoring — not as buzzwords, but as practical bridges between clinical care and daily life. We talked about what’s already working, what’s overhyped, and what’s still missing.
Rethinking What “Success” Means
One thread I keep coming back to, in the book and in this episode, is how we measure success in mental healthcare. Too often, the metric is simply access — did the person get an appointment, did they get a prescription filled. Those things matter. But they aren’t the whole picture.
What matters to the families living this every day is different: Can my daughter hold onto her independence? Is she building a life she wants, not just managing symptoms? Are we catching warning signs early enough to prevent a crisis instead of just responding to one? Real recovery is measured in quality of life, not just clinical checkboxes — and I think that’s a conversation the digital health world needs to have more often.
Why Caregivers and Clinicians Often Don’t Know What’s Out There
One of the harder truths we discussed: incredible tools already exist, and most caregivers and even many clinicians have never heard of them. That disconnect isn’t anyone’s fault exactly — it’s a symptom of an industry moving faster than the people trying to use it can keep up with. Part of why I wrote Connected Care, and part of why conversations like this one matter, is simply closing that awareness gap.
Designing Technology That’s Actually Human
The thing I most wanted listeners to walk away with is this: the opportunity in front of us isn’t just about building smarter tools. It’s about building tools that reduce stigma, support earlier intervention, give clinicians better data to act on, and — most importantly — help people rebuild their lives on their own terms. Innovation for its own sake isn’t the goal. Innovation that restores dignity and independence is.
Listen to the Full Conversation
Mandy and I covered a lot of ground — misconceptions about AI in mental healthcare, what better data-sharing between patients and providers could look like, and why I believe the next decade of behavioral health innovation has to be built with caregivers and patients, not just for them.
You can find the full episode, “Beyond the Appointment: Technology’s Role in Mental Health,” on Innovating for Impact: Where Bold Ideas Meet Public Purpose.
And if this conversation resonates, I’d love for you to check out my book, Connected Care: A Practical Guide to Technology for Serious Mental Illness — it’s the deeper dive behind everything we touched on in this episode.
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Nicole Drapeau Gillen is an author, caregiver advocate, and technology leader whose work sits at the intersection of digital innovation and behavioral health.
