Mental health insider.
Founder. Author.

I didn't plan to spend my life in mental health. My family didn't give me a choice.

My brother died by suicide after a battle with schizophrenia. I live and work with high-functioning depression. I grew up in rural Texas learning that what happened inside our house stayed there — and that the silence nearly cost me everything.

I started my career in magazine publishing, working my way up through Time Inc. and Hearst. I launched Cosmopolitan.com in 2007 and spent years writing about the topics I was raised not to talk about. After a series of essays about mental illness for Salon and The Morning News, strangers started writing back. I decided to become part of the solution.

I pivoted to the mental health sector and built the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline website, developing relationships with national media and working with Facebook, Google, Tumblr, and YouTube to establish best practices for suicide prevention online. While working at Fountain House — a community-based program for people with serious mental illness — I earned my MPH in health policy.

After graduate school, I published Everything Is Going to Be OK: A Real Talk Guide for Living Well with Mental Illness, and began advocating for mental health policy with legislators in DC. Then I joined Crisis Text Line, where I built the organization's public narrative from the ground up — placing 500+ national news stories in a single year, including CNN, MSNBC, NPR, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, and Newsweek.

In 2022, I played a central role in launching the National Maternal Mental Health Hotline on Mother's Day — a federal initiative under the Biden Administration through HRSA. In 2026, I founded Therapy Without Borders, a 501(c)(4) dismantling the state-by-state licensing barriers that keep millions of people from accessing mental health care.