You're listening to TED Talks Daily. I'm Elise Hugh. Today's speaker, Tom Osborne, grew up in Kenya,

where academic pressure was intense, but mental health was not prioritized, sometimes even stigmatized.

In his 2021 talk from Ted Monterey, the mental health innovator shares the journey of how he came to recognize anxiety and depression in himself and among his fellow Kenyans and is now using tech to redefine what mental health care can look like.

Around the world, and especially in low-resour countries like my home country of Kenya,

mental health problems prevent young people from living independent and successful lives.

I was born on raised in a small sugar cane farm.

Some of my early memories are those of my younger brother and I walking around

and pretending that we owned this sugar

again. But most of these memories were actually from school. My parents, and especially my

mother, made sure that I knew how much they'd sacrificed for me to have the education and the

path to success that they did not. They were very clear that the sticks were too high.

There was no room for disappointment.

There was no room for failure.

When I was 12, I moved to the boarding section of a local primary school.

Here we will wake up at 4 a.m. to a set of math problems

that we had to solve before breakfast. We'd only go to bed sometimes of math problems we had resolved before breakfast.

We'd only go to bed sometimes after 11 if we solved that night's science problems.

In high school, the pressure was even higher.

The early morning to late-night routines were now supplemented by Saturday and Sunday classes.

It was here in high school, where I began to notice the personal, emotional, and behavioral

at all that this pressure cooker system had exalted myself and those around me.

I noticed it, for example, when tired of cramming the production of sulfuric acid, I stopped

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