My psychiatrist increased my daily dosage of Wellbutrin from 150mg to 300mg. The lower dose just isn’t working. When I started my recovery journey, my goal was to get off all of my medication. Despite everything I’ve ever said about medication being an important tool in managing mental health, I continue to internalize the stigma.
It feels like I’ve failed, even though I know that isn’t true.
Published by liz
From history major, with side quests in Medieval Studies and chemical engineering, to nonprofit finance leader, Big 4 tax partner, technologist, researcher, and now co-founder of Divine, nothing about my career has been linear. The throughline has always been systems: financial systems, organizational systems, technological systems, and human systems. I have an MBA in Operations and Supply Chain Management and a PhD in Organizational Leadership Psychology, and I’ve spent my career trying to understand how complex systems shape people’s choices, opportunities, wellbeing, and sense of belonging. Today, my work sits at the intersection of psychology, technology, human-centered design, and digital trust. I am co-founder of Divine, an open-source, decentralized social video app built to put creativity back in human hands and replace doomscrolling with joyscrolling. Divine is part of a bigger question I care deeply about: how do we create online spaces that support safety, creativity, identity, and belonging without defaulting to surveillance, extraction, or control? At Divine, I wear a lot of hats across engineering, finance, operations, and strategy, while helping shape the app’s trust, safety, and values work. I focus especially on teen online safety, human-generated content, participatory design, and healthier relationships with technology. I am a postdoctoral alum of Vanderbilt University’s Department of Computer Science, where I worked with Dr. Pam Wisniewski’s Socio-Technical Interaction Research Lab. I continue to write, speak, and research at the intersection of online safety, digital trust, decentralized technology, and youth wellbeing. I was named a Distinguished Fellow at the Institute for Data Integrity in 2023. In 2025, I had the honor of serving as President of Division 13 of the American Psychological Association, the Society of Consulting Psychology. I also live with major depressive disorder and obsessive-compulsive disorder. In 2020, I took a leave from PwC to focus on my mental wellness, and I now speak and write openly about mental health, especially in the workplace and in relation to digital wellbeing. This blog, Seriously Jerk Brain, chronicles much of that journey.
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Seriously, Jerk Brain?! 
Liz – I continue to be amazed with your honesty and transparency through your blog, along with all your talents that come across through your blog. I realize my words can’t change the way you feel, but in my eyes, you are a hero and I’m proud to know you – no failure here!
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Jerkbrain can only win if you surrender logic and reason to terror. This you cannot do unaided. If the infantry is being overrun, are they at fault for calling in the artillery? Or calling in airstrikes? Who cares, as long as you win.
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Dear One,
From observing my daughter who rides the waves of depression…you are sounding so “normal” about things. However, your competitive nature, coupled with make sense of everything, makes everything so black and white and you are living with something very grey. Your goal to be off medication is a lofty one but grey is not either or, it is a blend. Write down what you have accomplished and tout those to yourself. Failure, hardly. When one admits to the mental illness of depression…there is work to be done but you have already accomplished the tallest and loftiest of hurdles. Initially, for my daughter, it was a challenge to find the correct shade of grey. Constant tweaking and meeting with therapist. As the years have gone by, she has gotten to know herself better and can tell when the grey needs tweaking. She is also tuned into when she needs to initiate contact with the therapist or just do the routine checkups…including ones in which she is told this is one of the healthiest times I have seen you.
I can armchair quarterback you and your journey but it won’t be helpful. What I can do is affirm you are way ahead in the game of depression because you are helping yourself. Maybe your goal needs to be revised to include the grey.
There is much to listen to in your father’s wisdom. I can only add the wisdom of the song lyric Let It Go. You are doing the best you can and that my dear, is more than enough. Depression is not something you have to defeat, you only have to learn to live with it because it is now a part of you that you have claimed and are learning to live with,
Be not afraid to journey into the grey with my love and prayers.
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