Poonacha MachaiahCEO & Co-founder Unlocking AI-driven Peak Living

AI in Healthcare with Poonacha Machaiah | A Consciousness-based Approach to Wellbeing

18 May 2025 · 2 min

Watch on YouTube

2:12

In this interview Poonacha Machaiah describes the current global mental‑health crisis, calling it a silent pandemic where a suicide occurs every 40 seconds and loneliness is widespread. He emphasizes that true well‑being begins with self‑knowledge—understanding who you are, your purpose, and gratitude—arguing that this eliminates loneliness. Recognizing that conventional psychiatric and therapeutic services are unaffordable and scarce for many (e.g., Bangalore’s 12 million residents), he and Deepak founded “Cyber Human,” a digital platform that delivers a consciousness‑based approach to mental health that is affordable, subscription‑free, and accessible. The platform blends traditional, complementary, and lifestyle medicine to prescribe holistic lifestyle changes, treating the person as a whole rather than a set of diagnoses. Machaiah cites a large Google study showing psychological safety as the top factor for successful managers, extending this insight to suggest that organizations should prioritize personal well‑being, which in turn supports societal and planetary health.

Chapters

When you look at the world today, the silent pandemic has been the mental health pandemic. Every 40 seconds we lose someone to suicide globally and we realize that, we talk about suicidality. That's towards the end, 99% happens leading up to it. I've been working with Deepak over two decades and the vision of Deepak has been how do we reach a critical mass, a billion plus people, for a more peaceful, just sustainable, healthier and joyful world. Loneliness is one of the biggest pandemics right now, today in New York. Days can go by, nobody even asks who you are. There's solitude and loneliness. Solitude is so much is beautiful actually, right? In the solitude you ask the questions. So for us, it really became about helping people get to know who they are. Who am I, what do I want, what's my purpose and what am I grateful for? They say anxiety is a dizziness of the soul. When you get to know who you are, you're never going to be lonely, right? Not everybody can afford seeing a psychiatrist. Not everybody can afford to go see a therapist. A city like Bangalore, where I live and there are 12 million people, I don't think there are enough therapists. And well being should be affordable, accessible to all. And that really got us to really start cyber human. Our goal was to take a consciousness based approach to mental well being or health. So we want to bring that into the domain and make it accessible. Somebody in India can use it for one hour, one week, one month. Why do people have to subscribe, make it accessible? We want to bring together traditional medicine, complementary medicine and lifestyle medicine so we can prescribe you a lifestyle. So we look at the person in totality, not as a specialty. If you look at mental health, a lot of it is just a diagnosis, right? We take a very complex human being and we diagnose them. But a person who walks into your organization is a living, breathing person. And if you look at the Google study, the largest study they did, what made successful managers, they found number one thing was psychological safety. People belong. So an organization, an enterprise, should look at personal well being. How does it enable societal well being? Eventually the planetary well being.