Eli Shalenberg

Over 800,000 New Yorkers experience mental illness symptoms that impair their day to day functioning. While the city is committed to providing clinical services to these vulnerable New Yorkers, an important piece of the puzzle has been left out: the people supporting them. The majority of New Yorkers with serious mental illness live with family caregivers. These caregivers are the invisible backbone of New York’s mental health system.

The Care Hack is a free digital platform that supports mental illness caregivers with access to peer groups, personalized content, and on-demand coaching from licensed clinicians. Co-founded by psychiatrist Eli Shalenberg, who has spent over a decade working in NYC’s public health care system, the program is grounded in decades of research demonstrating that caregiver support leads to better outcomes for individuals with mental illness. The Care Hack fills an enormous gap with a model designed for scale and accessibility. Together we can improve mental health outcomes and public safety, creating a new blueprint for family-centered mental health care with New York City leading the way.