Chill Pill is the new must-have mental health app that Gen Z girls are obsessed with

NEW YORK, May 10, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Mental health shouldn't be depressing. Or at least that's what the founder & CEO of Chill Pill, Hayley Caddes, set out to prove when she raised over $2m for her audio peer support mental health app for Gen Z women in the summer of 2021. Since then, Chill Pill has managed to do something very few other consumer social apps have been able to do - create a safe, welcoming, online community for teenage and young adult women to talk about their mental health and support each other through their tough times and bad days.

"I feel this sense of community and freedom to be myself and to be vulnerable that I haven't found anywhere else," says one of Chill Pill's teenage members, who has been attending and leading Chill Pill's peer support groups for the past 9 months.

Chill Pill describes its community as a safe, online space for female-identifying, non-binary, and gender-fluid Gen Z'ers to work on their mental health.

Members can interact with each other on the app, which launched on the App Store on May 10th, in two ways: by attending community- led audio support groups and by anonymously posting their daily thoughts and reflections to Chill Pill's judgement-free journal feed.

By creating a culture where members can only share about their own experiences and how they can relate to others, where they are not permitted to provide advice or give feedback to other members, Chill Pill has managed to create a community that one of their members describes as "safe, open, supportive, and so welcoming. It feels kind of like a second family."

Since opening up to the public, Chill Pill's community has grown exponentially. To date, Chill Pill has around 500 active members and has had over 7,000 minutes of support groups prior to the app's official launch.

"Our app was built by our community, for our community," says founder & CEO Hayley Caddes, who raised capital pre-product based off a small proof-of-concept and her own personal story, from Stellation Capital, Notation Capital, Expa, The Fund, and Supernode Ventures, as well as notable angels such as Rob Fishman and Darren Lachtman, the founders of Brat TV, and Alex Chung, the founder & CEO of Giphy.

Caddes is using her 5 years of experience in Alcoholics Anonymous and attending AA meetings when she was 16-22, to design support groups that teenage girls can run by themselves without the need for a professional to moderate. "AA has been around for almost 100 years, is the most successful mental health community in the world, and is run by alcoholics, for alcoholics. There's a lot to learn from the AA model," she says. Every support group is run the exact same way and they are similar to AA meetings in that attendees can only share about their own experiences, cannot provide advice or give feedback to other members, and are led by 2 volunteer members of the community - who schedule the meeting, pick a mental health topic to talk about of their choice, and kick off the sharing.

The founder is building the mental health community she wish she had as a teenager. One of their 16-year old members says, "Being part of this community means feeling welcomed and safe no matter what walk of life you are from or what past traumas you've had." Chill Pill's mission is to expand the community to help millions of other young women around the world feel the same.

SOURCE Chill Pill