Living out loud

liz

Putting my story into the public domain has not always been easy, but I’ve felt it was necessary. There are still too many people suffering in silence. They’re afraid that they will be ostracized, rejected, ignored, or otherwise harmed if they speak the truth about their depression or anxiety. I hope my actions empower someone else to emerge from the darkness and seek help.

When I decided to take the leave of absence from my job late last year, every person in a position of authority I spoke to assured me that I wasn’t alone. At the same time, none of them could point me to someone else in my peer group who was willing to share their experience.

Underlying all of my discussions was an unspoken expectation that I would want to keep everything private. The more I thought about it, the more it didn’t sit right with me. The unconscious implication was that I was (or should be) embarrassed or ashamed. I’m neither of those things, especially when it comes to my mental health.

This time last year, I was in the midst of a major depressive episode that was spiraling out of control. In November, I hit my lowest point. My parents read this blog and so I’ll stop there with the details.

For as bad as this year has been in so many ways for so many people, it is an indescribable improvement for me over last year. I am alive. And, more importantly, I want to keep living.

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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.

4 Comments

  1. Love you so much Liz!! I am glad you are given a voice to mental health and letting others know they are not alone. I am so glad that you are still here and that we will be able to plan new adventures and create more memories together. ❤

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