Our Mission
MatchA Mental Health Inc. exists to help people who are struggling with the physical side effects of mental distress — things like tremors, heart palpitations, chronic fatigue, limpness in the limbs, or visual snow — that a lot of the time go completely unexplained in normal medical settings. We want to help these people recover and get back control of their lives.
The Problem We're Solving
For a lot of people, these symptoms are very real and very disabling, but they're not really accounted for anywhere in the healthcare system right now. Patients go to the doctor and leave with no diagnosis and no real next step, and a lot of providers, through no fault of their own honestly, don't always think to consider that mental health could be the reason behind physical symptoms like these. So you end up with this population of people who are stuck in between — too physical of a problem for typical mental health support, but too unexplained for regular medicine to help with.
And this isn't a small problem either. The DSM-5 says that about 5 to 7 percent of the U.S. population deals with some kind of somatic symptom and related disorder (SSRD) at any given time, and there's research from the NIH that says 20 to 25 percent of those cases end up becoming chronic. So that's millions of people across the country who are living with symptoms that get in the way of their ability to work, move around, eat normally, or just get through their day, and a lot of them don't even know who to go to for help.
Our Approach
The center of what MatchA does is a matching algorithm that's based on symptoms, which we believe is the first of its kind. Most platforms out there make users self-diagnose before they even talk to a provider, which we think is backwards. Instead, we just ask people to describe what they're actually going through, and then we match them with a licensed therapist who fits their specific symptoms and personality, building out a recovery plan that's personalized right from the start. To be clear, this isn't meant to replace professional medical care — we see it more as the bridge that helps get people to the right kind of care a little faster.
Our Broader Vision
Matching people with therapists is a big part of what we do, but it's not the only part. We also care a lot about changing the way this issue is talked about, and we think that starts with younger people. We've been building partnerships with high schools to start student-led chapters that host talks, run awareness campaigns, and bring in experts to speak, all with the goal of helping teens understand the connection between physical and mental health before it turns into a bigger issue down the line. Right now we're starting in New Jersey, but the hope is to eventually expand statewide and then nationally.
We also don't think recovery should only be available to people who can pay for it. As we grow, we plan on setting aside funding to help subsidize costs for clients who don't have insurance, and we want to build out more resources beyond just the therapist-matching feature itself. No one should be left without help just because of a financial barrier.
At the end of the day, our goal is pretty simple, even if it's a big one: we want to build a place where anyone in the country dealing with the physical toll of mental health has somewhere real to go, and the actual resources to start healing.
About Us
MatchA Mental Health Inc. is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit headquartered in Edison, New Jersey, though we operate online so we can reach clients all across the country. We didn't actually start out as a mental health organization — back in 2023, we started as Aid Plus, which was focused on building individualized first aid kits for underserved healthcare communities around the world. That work had us going into hospitals and clinics all over the globe, and along the way we kept running into the same issue over and over: patients showing up with real, disabling symptoms that no one could explain, symptoms that were often rooted in stress or mental health that had gone unaddressed rather than any physical cause doctors could actually diagnose. After a lot of research (and a lot of long conversations, honestly) we decided to pivot completely and relaunch as MatchA, with the goal of building the first symptom-based platform to connect people with the mental health care that actually fits what they're going through.
Our leadership team has five officers, each one running a committee that covers a different part of what we do — strategy, operations, financial compliance, technology, and capital advancement. Between us we've got backgrounds in cognitive science, molecular biology, math, computer science, and economics, and our hands-on experience covers everything from crisis hotline work and EMT service to research on functional neurological disorders and machine learning work on mental health outcomes. What ties us all together is that we've each seen up close how much physical symptoms of mental distress can affect someone's life, and we all want to build something that actually does something about it.