In the economic downturn, what kind of business is profitable? Psychological counseling is one of them.
When the year is good, everyone has hope and walks with the wind, so why do you need any psychological counseling?
But in the economic downturn, it's different.
Pessimistic, disappointed, helpless, lying flat, angry......
This also makes psychological counseling a rare good industry under this Kangbo cycle.
1. Industry scale and industrial chain
In 2014, the market size of China's psychological counseling industry was only 21.46 billion yuan, and in 2018, it increased to 37.76 billion yuan, with a CAGR = 15.2% during the period. It is predicted that the overall scale of China's psychological counseling industry in 2023 will be 95.34 billion yuan, with a CAGR=20.3% from 2019 to 2023. According to the White Paper on the Mental Health of Urban Residents in China released by the Health Management Branch of the Chinese Medical Association, 73.6% of urban residents are currently in a state of sub-mental health, and 16.1% have varying degrees of psychological problems.
All in all, the industry is currently growing rapidly, and its scale has reached the level of nearly 100 billion yuan, thanks to the increase in the number of patients.
The development of the psychological counseling industry is rare and certain, because the economic downturn will cause more psychological problems. But the economic downturn has reduced people's purchasing power and is a hindrance to this industry.
Another obstacle is the issue of patient wishes. While the number of people is expanding and the economic downturn is making people more pessimistic, most people don't feel the problem should be addressed. About half of the people solve problems on their own through exercise and reading, rather than spending money to solve problems.
In the case of depression, the lifetime prevalence of depression is 6.9%, but only 9.5% of this group receive treatment. In the United States, the rate of treatment for people with mental illness is also less than 10%. Therefore, the penetration rate of this industry is not increased with the development and maturity of the industry, it will always be so low, and the penetration rate is not the main logic of the growth of the industry, but the increase in the total number of sick people is.
In the entire industry chain, the most scarce and critical resource is psychological counselors. By the end of 2020, there were 50,124 psychiatric practitioners (assistants) (3.55 per 100,000 people) in China, a gap of about 1.36 million psychiatrists per 1,000 people recommended by the World Health Organization.
Psychological counseling practitioners must hold a certificate to work, but the assessment threshold for qualification certificates is low, and the quality of industry practitioners is uneven, making it difficult to ensure the effectiveness of treatment for help-seekers. Therefore, in 2017, the Ministry of Chinese and Social Security issued the Notice on the Publication of the National Vocational Qualification Catalogue, abolishing the professional appraisal of psychological counselors and implementing list-based management for psychological counselor practitioners, so as to solve the problem of excessive and excessive professional qualifications and raise the threshold for industry entry.
It is important to note that psychotherapists and counselors are two different groups. Therapists work in health care institutions and have a certificate issued by the Ministry of Health, but are not authorized to diagnose and prescribe mental disorders. Counsellors, on the other hand, work for social institutions and do not have the authority to diagnose them. If it is really serious to the point of mental illness, you need to go to a regular hospital for diagnosis, prescription, and medicine. The counsellor is only responsible for accompaniment and enlightenment.
Although there is no industry entry threshold for consultants, there is actually an invisible threshold, that is, how professional they are, whether they can effectively solve problems, or whether they only collect money and do nothing. But this also creates a problem of information asymmetry:
- Distrust of Counselors: How Good Are You as a Counselor? Because of the low entry threshold, the low level of education of psychological counselors, the large deviation between their educational background and the psychological counseling industry, and the lack of rigorous training have caused consumers to distrust this industry.
- Distrust of Results: Can You Really Solve My Problem? After all, physical illness is easy to treat, heart disease is difficult to treat, and users are skeptical about the effect. The effect of psychological counseling cannot be quantified, and there are many schools of thought, and there is no unified methodology and supervision system.
- Distrust of the service process: How do you serve me? If it's just to pay someone to talk to me, then I can just talk to a friend?
2. Business model
The mainstream business models of psychological counseling include the Internet, offline counseling, and EAP.
The Internet channel allows counselors to provide services to patients through online voice, video call and other technologies, and the biggest advantage is that it removes the restrictions of time and geography, and also solves the problem of the lack of economies of scale in the traditional model (offline stores). However, the limitations of the online model are also obvious: there is a lack of face-to-face service, a greater lack of trust, and the inability of consultants to observe consumers' expressions and demeanors, making them more subjective.
- Representative companies: One Psychology, One Point Spirit, Sugar Psychology
Consultants can observe consumers' emotional changes and physical behaviors at close range through face-to-face consultations, supplemented by physical indicators monitored by medical equipment, so as to make judgments on consumers' psychological conditions and increase the accuracy of consumers' diagnosis and treatment. However, it faces development bottlenecks such as the difficulty of large-scale expansion, the high cost of time and space, and the limited number of customers.
- Representative company: Reuters Psychological Counseling
EAP is an employee promotion plan, including stress management, occupational mental health, layoff psychological crisis, catastrophic events, career development, healthy living, etc., psychological counseling can be used as a module in EAP services to improve employees' work performance in the enterprise. Compared with the 2C model, the 2B model has a more stable customer source, and once the long-term cooperation is long-term, it is possible to obtain stable business cash flow, but the payment ability of small and medium-sized enterprises is weak, and the EAP market is mainly in large enterprises, which are very dependent on relationships and resources, so most of the domestic EAP suppliers are foreign capital and state-owned enterprises.
- Representative companies: Tianli Asia Pacific, Shengxin Sunshine, Ips
3. Group characteristics
C-end users are mostly distributed in first-tier cities such as Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, and Shenzhen, accounting for 55.6% of the first-tier cities, and the main psychological distress includes emotional distress such as depression and anxiety, as well as the pressure caused by self-growth needs and various relationships. The highest concentration of patients is in Guangzhou, where it is estimated that 13 out of every 100 mainlanders have a mental disorder. The psychological pressure of the post-80s generation comes mostly from family or intimate relationships, and the psychological pressure of the post-90s and post-00s generations comes more from the pressure of personal development and growth. The more educated user groups are more receptive to psychological counseling.
Therefore, as an emerging service, psychological counseling is related to consumption upgrading, and consumers in first-tier cities with higher income and education generally accept it first, and then popularize it to other groups. It is best for psychological counseling practitioners to try to run through the unit model in first-tier cities.
Anxiety and depression are the two most important problems, and the influencing factors of the two are highly similar, which brings a certain convenience to the counseling agency. And the problems faced by young people are even more serious. In the United States, half of young people under the age of 29 have depression and anxiety that gradually decrease with age. It may be that people are getting older, and many things have been seen, and when they reach the point of "knowing the destiny of heaven", there are fewer psychological problems.
According to WHO data, more than 350 million people in the world suffer from depression, and the growth rate of patients in the past decade is about 18%, that is, 5% of adults in the world suffer from depression every year, and the number of people in mainland China is about 95 million. The lifetime prevalence of depression is 6.9%, the 12-month prevalence is 3.6%, and the recurrence rate is as high as 50%~85%, of which 50% will relapse within 2 years after the occurrence of the disease. With the general environment, the future is more pessimistic, and depression and anxiety will enter a high incidence period, with the pre-pandemic incidence of depression rising from 8.5% to 27.8% in 2020 and 32.8% in 2021. Nearly one-third of the stress responses in the country.
In terms of gender, women are more likely to receive psychological counseling services. In 2020, the rate of women receiving treatment in United States is more than 20%, while only 10% of men, so people engaged in psychological counseling can consider market segmentation, starting with women under 30 years old in first-tier cities, and mainly treat depression and anxiety.
4. Direction: AI psychological counseling
Writing here, Lin Jiaotou's preliminary understanding of this line is: this line is not complicated, not much can be written, if you want to start a business, the main thing is to find the right customer group and provide targeted services. In the context of the general environment, there are opportunities for psychological counseling, and young women in first-tier cities are the main customer group, and depression and anxiety are the main indications.
At present, the problem of business model is restricting this industry.
First of all, the EAP model has too high resource requirements and is not suitable for entrepreneurs to cut into. The cake that can be eaten is only left by the C-end customer group, and the business model is nothing more than online or offline, or a combination of the two. The biggest problem with the traditional model is replicability, that is, it relies too much on the consultant himself, and one-on-one consulting work cannot achieve economies of scale.
AI technology can solve this problem.
Artificial intelligence psychological counseling, that is, a robot or dialogue system that uses artificial intelligence technology to provide psychological assistance and psychological support to clients. The advantage of AI is that it can internalize the counselor's cognition and cases, and use AI to "copy" an agent similar to the counselor himself. The current large model can even customize the tone of voice so that the chat style is the same as that of the consultant. However, the current AI technology has not yet completely replaced the consultant, at most it is to copy an "apprentice" to help customers solve some basic problems for free, liberate the hands of consultants and expand the customer base, and solve the pain points that are difficult to replicate and scale.
Therefore, if you are a psychological counselor and you have a wealth of knowledge and cases, it is recommended to try to build an agent on the large model and open it to customers, this agent is your virtual replicator, which can help you solve some repetitive, simple and tedious tasks.
However, in my experience of using GPT, GPT cannot do too complex tasks at present, it can be said to be very similar, but not necessarily right, for example, when I asked GPT about the capital market and the economy, it answered very well, but it could not be falsified, and it could not empathize with human emotions. It is rumored that the latest ChatGPT strawberry model is coming out, with a price of $200 a month, and I don't know how far it can go. Therefore, the application of AI in psychological counseling is the trend and the future, but the entire industry is still in its early stages.
The core resource of AI is data, so database resources such as industry know-how and cases are the core of AI psychological counseling technology. For current enterprises, whether they can have sufficient talent reserves and a complete AI psychological counseling system is the key to obtaining financing, and it is also the link with the highest bargaining power.