An increasing number of youth and adults in the region may be suffering from anxiety or depression, yet few psychiatrists exist per capita. For example, in a country like Egypt, there are an estimated 2,000 psychiatrists serving a population of over 100 million. That’s one doctor for every 50,000. Compare that number to the US, where there are 10 psychiatrists for every 100,000 individuals.

There’s also the problem of various societies’ mixed perception of mental health. But out of these complexities an app was born.

Shezlong is an online psychotherapy platform that offers the service of connecting patients with psychiatrists online, removing the complex conundrum of having to take the hard step many fear of going to a clinic.

You simply log into the application, choose a licensed doctor out of the ones they have signed up, and start pouring talking.

For the Egyptian entrepreneur behind it, the decision to start Shezlong came from a personal struggle.

“The company started in late 2014; I’d recently had an accident and the doctors told me I wouldn’t be able to move my hand again,” explains co-founder and CEO Ahmed Abu El-Haz. “I got into a state of severe depression and I myself was in need of therapy. It was at this moment I started thinking why not create a platform that helps people in similar dire conditions?”

But tackling such a sensitive issue was never going to be easy. The team had to first ask themselves whether the region was ready to accept - and invest in - a solution like the one they were offering.

“To see how people would react for something like this, and prepare them for our service, we started doing online awareness campaigns about mental health and psychological problems and how they’re like any other disease, in need for treatment, and people started interacting with us and they started using our service and started getting really better,” Abu El-Haz says.

Then there was the matter of getting health professionals to help.

“We started talking to psychiatrists and offering them to join us,” he continues. “Our angle was that Shezlong would get them more exposure to help more people, in more than one country, and it wouldn’t hurt to have an extra source of revenue next to their own clinics.

“It also helped that many of these doctors needed a means of communication with their patients while travelling abroad for conferences or something, and through Shezlong, they had that.”

The platform is trying to change how Arab societies view mental illness, by pointing out that there’s no shame in it.

“We provide a safe space for people to get cured instead of hearing that all they need to get better is to pray or go have a vacation and they’ll all be better,” the entrepreneur says. “Many people don’t understand that mental illness is like any other illness and it can’t be cured by any of the above; they require actual treatment and therapy and a cure does exist out there, and it’s within reach.”

Now accessible in over 70 countries, with the main focus being the Middle East, Shezlong’s team has big plans for the future.

“We want to have as many doctors as we could have, and we want to create more accessible and tailored services for people, like providing therapy through texting and creating counselling services for companies,” Abu El-Haz concludes. “Our goal is for people to accept treatment for mental illness, and to provide a private counsellor for every person that they could rely on and trust.”