The GLP-1 moment is here for advanced mental health treatments

Maria is a 43-year-old middle-school teacher with two children of her own, and she has been depressed for the better part of a decade. Over those years, her long-term psychiatrist prescribed her a few different antidepressants, each with a hopeful first few weeks, then the familiar slide back down, plus a new side effect to manage. Her psychiatrist was kind and competent, but he simply ran out of things to prescribe. By the time she stopped believing treatment could work, Maria was resigned that this flattened, exhausted version of herself was just who she was now.

Maria isn’t unusual. She could be any one of us, the roughly one in three people whose depression doesn’t respond to medication or talk therapy. What Maria doesn’t know yet is that help through advanced mental health treatments could be the solution she needs for her treatment-resistant depression (TRD).

Highly effective, FDA-cleared treatments are moving from boutique into mainstream care. With new treatments that are currently in the FDA review process, the number of patients who can be treated potentially rises four-to-fivefold, from about seven million eligible today toward an estimated 28 to 34 million by 2029.

GLP-1s existed for nearly 20 years before they became mainstream. Advanced interventional psychiatry treatments are approaching an inflection point, similar to the one GLP-1 drugs did for metabolic health. Highly effective, FDA-cleared treatments are moving from boutique into mainstream care. With new treatments that are currently in the FDA review process, the number of patients who can be treated potentially rises four-to-fivefold, from about seven million eligible today toward an estimated 28 to 34 million by 2029. And increasingly, people can receive these treatments right in the practice they already know and trust, rather than being referred elsewhere. For people like Maria, it’s the difference between a decade of managed decline and a genuine shot at remission.

What is interventional psychiatry?

Interventional psychiatry is a subspecialty focused on treatments that go beyond the standard tools of medication and talk therapy, typically for people whose depression or other conditions haven’t responded to those options (often called treatment-resistant patients). Instead of only prescribing pills or providing psychotherapy, interventional psychiatry uses more direct, procedure-based approaches to change brain activity.

For treatment-resistant patients, options like transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) and SPRAVATO® deliver meaningfully higher remission rates and more durable relief than trying another medication, and without the side effects.

For Maria, that translated into something concrete. A few weeks into a course of TMS, she noticed she’d laughed at something for the first time in longer than she could remember. Small things came back before big ones: interest in a book, the willingness to answer a friend’s text, an appetite for a morning walk. Her PHQ-9 score, a standard depression measure, dropped by more than half over the course of treatment. She would later describe it not as feeling high or fixed, but as feeling like herself again, a self she’d started to think was gone for good.

Multiply that experience across the roughly 7 million people with TRD, and the millions of people who have mental health conditions addressable by advanced interventions, and you understand why we’re at this inflection point.

Closing the gap between treatment and access

The pool of people who can benefit keeps widening as new treatments arrive. Advances in neuromodulation and molecule-based therapies, including psychedelics, are expected to extend relief to millions more patients in the years ahead, pushing the number who can finally be helped toward an estimated 28 to 34 million.

The treatments work, and the patients exist, but most eligible people still never get to them. The bottleneck has never been the demand. The bottleneck is the infrastructure. Ensuring patients have access to these life-changing treatments within their mental health practices is costly and cumbersome.

Maria was lucky. Her psychiatrist happened to offer these treatments within the practice. Millions of patients aren’t in the same position, and they never learn that a treatment like the one that helped her was available the whole time.

That is why we created Everbright Health. We partner with mental health practices to launch, manage, and scale advanced interventions, starting with TMS and SPRAVATO®. Raw patient records typically surface only a fraction of the people who qualify; the rest are missed. Prior authorization can often stall out in a typical practice. Referrals get lost in intake. Everbright smooths out this pathway from end to end. We identify patients who can benefit from advanced interventions, stand up the service line in the existing mental health practice, handle all prior authorizations and billing issues, and run the day-to-day treatments.

Our approach is win-win-win. By embedding in existing mental health practices, we support patients by providing much-needed treatments to help them recover or, in many cases, move into remission. We support practices by keeping existing eligible patients under their care and by growing their overall revenue. And the healthcare system wins by moving members with TRD into response or remission, which creates a substantial drop in total cost of care and annual savings across the TRD population.

Maria is a teacher back in her classroom rather than a patient cycling through crises, ER visits, and disability. An amazing outcome for her, and less costly for the system that covers her.

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