A dear family friend sent me a link to David Brooks’ personal essay in the NYT about the loss of his lifelong friend, Peter Marks, to suicide. It’s a beautiful and poignant piece that captures the heartache and feelings of helplessness that those who love and care for someone experiencing a mental health crisis often experience. I also appreciated how he drew on the work of people like William Styron and Sally Brampton, who have both written extensively on their own journeys through clinical depression.
What struck me was how closely many of the points he made about the experience of depression mirror what I have written and spoken about here on the blog and in other forums. It feels a bit like I read the same stories everywhere. It makes me wonder. Why isn’t the awareness greater and the help more accessible and equitable?
It’s a rhetorical question, I know. Structurally, there are many factors working against mental health education and care around the world. Some are cultural, others driven by capital. Despite a nagging level of cynicism, I remain overall optimistic and hopeful that each article, podcast, video, every story shared privately and publicly chips away at the stigma and opens hearts and minds to the realities of mental health.
We are interconnected and interdependent. Mental health matters for all of us. Let us make sure that it is so.
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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