“My 6-year-old son wants to kill himself…” Mom builds AI tool to save children with mental health issues

Child mental health

In October 2020, Hafeezah Muhammad’s 6-year-old son looked at her and said he wanted to kill himself.
Her heart sank. She never saw it coming.

At the time, Hafeezah was an executive at a national mental health company. She understood the system well, yet she still could not get her son, who has a disability and is on Medicaid, the care he needed, according to a report by Gizmodo.

“Only about 30 percent of providers even accept Medicaid,” she told the publication. “More than half of kids in the U.S. come from multicultural households, and there were no solutions that truly worked for us.”

She felt terrified and embarrassed, worried about the stigma that comes with a young child struggling. So she decided to create what she could not find.

Today, Hafeezah is the founder and CEO of Backpack Healthcare, a Maryland-based provider that has already helped more than 4,000 children, most of them on Medicaid. Her goal is to use technology to make mental health care more accessible while keeping human therapists at the center.

Backpack uses AI in a different way from many other mental health tools. Instead of trying to act like a human, it focuses on simple but powerful tasks that give therapists more time for their patients.

An algorithm matches children with the right therapist on the first try. Ninety-one percent of patients stay with that first match. AI also drafts treatment plans and session notes, saving therapists more than 20 hours a week that used to be spent on paperwork.

“Our providers are now the editors, not the scribes,” Hafeezah explains.

Backpack’s 24/7 AI helper is called “Zipp,” a cheerful cartoon character. The design makes it clear that Zipp is a tool, not a person.

If a child types something that shows they may be thinking about suicide, Zipp immediately gives them crisis hotline numbers, tells them to call 911, and alerts Backpack’s human crisis team, who contact the family right away.

The system also tracks mental health trends like changes in anxiety or depression. If a child’s condition worsens, the care team is notified so they can step in quickly.

For Hafeezah, this work is personal. “We are not replacing therapists,” she says. “We are giving them a tool that keeps kids safer and helps them get better faster.”

What began with one frightening moment in her own home is now helping thousands of families find hope.