Twenty years ago, a documentary filmmaker and prevention researcher named Robyn Hussa Farrell was working in eating disorder and substance use treatment centers and asking a question that wouldn’t leave her alone: why do the people who most need mental health support so rarely find their way to it? The answer she kept arriving at wasn’t a shortage of content, funding, or clinical expertise. It was friction — the accumulated weight of stigma, fragmented systems, and platforms that required people to already know they were in crisis before they could access crisis support. Resiliency Technologies, Inc. and its flagship platform, the Sharpen® System, grew directly from that question and two decades of community-based research designed to answer it.

Who We Are

Resiliency Technologies is a U.S.-based digital health company founded by Robyn Hussa Farrell (CEO), Tim Farrell (COO), and Brian Painter (founding engineer). The three co-founders met during a Bloomberg Philanthropies-funded public art project in Spartanburg, South Carolina, where they discovered a shared conviction that technology, storytelling, and community-centered research could change how people experience mental health support.

The company’s mission is to improve emotional and behavioral well-being by making evidence-based mental health literacy, screening, and crisis support accessible to everyone.  Resiliency Technologies holds an active grant from the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) and has established research partnerships with Stanford Children’s Health, the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), UC Berkeley, the Edward Via College of Osteopathic Medicine (VCOM), Prisma Health Children’s Hospital, and 25+ academic institutions. The company has also completed five pre-submission meetings with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) as part of a clinical pathway for its clinical decision support and digital triage platform.

What We’ve Built: A System That Meets People Where They Are

The Sharpen® System integrates all three tiers of mental health prevention — education, early intervention, and crisis response — within a single, seamless digital experience. Users don’t need a clinical referral, a diagnosis, or even a clear sense that they’re struggling to access every layer of support the platform offers. The architecture was built specifically to meet people at the moment of curiosity, before the moment of crisis.

Over six years of real-world deployment across 80+ organizational partners, the platform has served 47,569+ users and generated:

• 2,850,546+ module views and 429,260+ estimated hours of engagement
• 148,388+ organic resource activations — including 15,570+ crisis resource engagements and 20,382+ self-initiated clinical screenings — all self-directed, with no pestering or digital recommendation system
• A 56.84% average engagement rate, compared to a 4–11% industry benchmark for digital therapeutics (a 5–14x difference)
• A 92% completion rate for peer-focused documentary film content

The platform has been validated across four distinct population toolkits — foster families and parenting (Sharpen Family), veterans and military families (Sharpen Warrior), medical students (VCOM Mindful Meds), and college campuses (Sharpen Colleges) — with consistent results across populations that face documented barriers to care.

In 2024, the team launched Sharpen DTX (digital therapeutics), a clinical-grade version of the platform that integrates directly with electronic health records (EHRs) and provides clinicians with validated behavioral health screening tools, real-time dashboards, and AI (artificial intelligence)-powered content recommendation. Active clinical trials are underway with Stanford Children’s Health, UCSF, and Prisma Health Children’s Hospital.

Rooted in Community and Story

What distinguishes the Sharpen® System from most digital mental health platforms are the thousands of stories the technology was built from. Every module in the platform’s library of 700+ evidence-based resources traces back to real community voices.  We conducted 500+ listening sessions, and 50,000+ post-program surveys to generate 4,000+ peer documentary films that form the foundation of the content library. The platform was literally constructed from lived experiences.

This commitment to community-driven storytelling extends to Resiliency Technologies’ documentary film division, White Elephant Enterprises, which co-directs public health films alongside the platform work. Current projects include Sylvia: The Wood Nymph, a feature documentary on dissociative identity disorder (DID) and childhood maltreatment, and a youth mental health documentary co-created with Dr. Stephen Hinshaw at UC Berkeley. For Resiliency Technologies, documentary film and digital therapeutics have never been separate projects. They’re two expressions of the same belief that story is the mechanism that opens the door to healing.

Joining the Global Conversation

Resiliency Technologies joins eMHIC as a Trailblazer with a particular interest in contributing to global conversations around seamless prevention architecture, community-based participatory research (CBPR) methodology, and the evidence base for peer documentary storytelling as a clinical mechanism. We believe the challenge of connecting digital mental health to real-world action pathways is a challenge every system in the world shares.  We are grateful to the eMHIC network for your leadership in solving this collaboratively.  We look forward to connecting with clinicians, researchers, health system leaders, and policymakers across the globe who share this work.

Visit us at sharpenminds.com or explore our blog at sharpenminds.com/blogs.