72% of Tech Founders Hide a Mental Crisis · CEREVITY
Knowledge Base / Founder Mental Health / August 2026
Start Therapy

Therapist Insights / Founder Mental Health

72% of tech founders hide a mental crisis.

The number in that headline is real, and it does not measure what the headline says it measures. What follows is both halves of the truth: what the 72% figure actually counted, and what founder concealment genuinely looks like when disclosure carries a cost that ordinary workplace stigma does not.

THE QUICK TAKEAWAY

The 72% figure circulating in founder mental health coverage comes from a 2019 study in Small Business Economics that surveyed 242 entrepreneurs against 93 comparison subjects. It reported that mental health differences directly or indirectly affected 72% of the entrepreneurs: 49% who reported a personal lifetime history, plus a further 23% who reported family history only. That is self-reported lifetime prevalence. Concealment is a separate behavior, documented in a separate literature, and it persists among founders because disclosure has a price that ordinary stigma does not. CEREVITY built confidential private-pay care around that specific problem.

§01 / 09 / Definition

What the 72% actually counted.

Freeman and colleagues surveyed 242 entrepreneurs against 93 comparison subjects and reported that mental health differences affected 72% of them directly or indirectly: 49% with a personal lifetime history and 23% with a family history alone. Founders in that sample were never asked whether they hid anything.

Two claims are stacked inside that headline, and only one of them is a measurement. The measurement belongs to Michael Freeman, Paige Staudenmaier, Mackenzie Zisser and Lisa Abdilova Andresen, writing in Small Business Economics in 2019 under the title The prevalence and co-occurrence of psychiatric conditions among entrepreneurs and their families. They ran a self-report survey covering five psychiatric conditions across 242 entrepreneurs and 93 comparison subjects, and they reported that mental health differences directly or indirectly affected 72% of the entrepreneurs in the sample. The 72% is a sum, not a single observation: 49% of the entrepreneurs reported a personal mental health history, and a further 23% reported no personal history but a family one. Inside the same sample, entrepreneurs reported more depression (30%), ADHD (29%), substance use (12%) and bipolar disorder (11%) than comparison participants, and 32% reported two or more conditions at once. What that instrument never did was ask anyone who knew. Lifetime self-reported prevalence answers the question has this ever been part of my life or my family's life. Concealment answers a different question: who else is aware of it. The headline's verb and the study's counted quantity are not the same thing, and a founder who arrived here after searching that number is owed the distinction rather than a smoother version of it. None of which makes the concealment claim false. Founder concealment is real, widely described, and evidenced by a different body of research that nobody bothers to cite because a rounded percentage is easier to put in a subject line. That research is worth reading, because it explains something the prevalence figure cannot: not how many founders carry something, but why so few of them say so, and what it costs to keep going that way. CEREVITY exists partly because that gap is where clinical care built for founders either happens or does not.

Five costs a founder weighs before telling anyone

01

Board confidence

Directors carry an explicit duty to assess whether the chief executive can execute the plan they approved. A disclosure that would be a private medical matter in almost any other job becomes, in front of a board, a data point about capacity. Founders assume it will be filed as one, and they are rarely wrong about that.

02

The next round

Diligence is built to surface anything that could impair the company's ability to perform. Founders reason, often accurately, that something said in confidence in year two can resurface as a question in year four, asked by someone with no clinical training and a fiduciary duty to their own limited partners.

03

Key-person perception

Early-stage valuation rests heavily on one or two people, and the documents say so out loud. Being named the key person is a compliment written in financial language, and it also means your steadiness has been placed on the balance sheet, where it can be marked down.

04

Team stability

Employees read the founder for weather. In a company where a third of the staff took a pay cut in exchange for equity, any visible sign that the founder is struggling doubles as information about whether they should quietly update a resume. Founders describe protecting the team as the reason they stay quiet.

05

No line between the person and the asset

Most professionals can be unwell without their employer's value changing. A founder's internal state and the company's story are narrated by the same person to the same audience, which removes the separation that makes disclosure survivable in a salaried role. There is nowhere for the news to land that is not also the business.

▶ Research

The largest synthesis of this behavior is not about founders at all, which is part of why it is credible here. Clement and colleagues, reviewing 144 studies covering more than 90,000 participants in Psychological Medicine, found that stigma exerts a small to moderate negative effect on help-seeking, and that disclosure concerns were the single most frequently reported stigma-related barrier, cited by a median of roughly 32% of participants across studies, with a range from 4% to 73%. The review also named the groups disproportionately deterred, among them men, military personnel and health professionals: populations whose occupational standing depends on being read as reliable. Founders do not appear on that list because nobody has studied founders at that scale. The mechanism is unmistakable all the same.1

What the concealment itself does

Care arrives late, when it arrives

The National Institute of Mental Health reports that of the 59.3 million United States adults with any mental illness in 2022, 50.6% received mental health treatment in the past year, which means close to half received none. Founders sit at the sharp end of that distribution, because every reason a salaried professional has to delay is present and several more are added on top.

Performance becomes the gauge, and it is a poor one

The threshold most founders set for themselves is whether the work is still getting done. Output is the last thing to fail and the first thing they check, so the test they are running is the one least likely to return a positive result. National Institute of Mental Health guidance sets a very different bar: severe or distressing symptoms lasting two weeks or more.

Managing the secret becomes a second job

Concealment is not passive. It requires monitoring what you said in the last all-hands, editing a board update, rehearsing an explanation for a cancelled meeting, and tracking who has been told what. That vigilance runs on the same depleted attention the underlying problem is already taxing, which is why founders often report that keeping it quiet is more exhausting than the thing being kept quiet.

The study counted how many founders have a history. It never asked how many were keeping one. Those are different questions, and only the second one is a strategy.

Who carries this with you

Concealment is rarely total. Most founders have told one person, sometimes two, and the shape of that small circle determines a great deal about how long the pattern can run before something gives. It is also why therapy for leadership isolation is so often where this work actually begins.

01

Your co-founder

The one person who understands the company completely is also the person whose confidence you most need to keep intact. Co-founder disclosure is never neutral: it shifts the balance of a partnership that is already carrying the structural load, and both people know it.

02

Your leadership team

Executives hired specifically to absorb pressure cannot absorb this one, because you are the thing they are calibrating against. Founders describe the silence as protecting the team, which is true and is also the mechanism by which the isolation deepens month over month.

03

Your partner at home

Partners usually know first and know most, and they are frequently the only person carrying any of it. That makes them a genuine support and a single point of failure at the same time, which is a load nobody signed up for and few relationships can hold indefinitely.

§02 / 09 / Telehealth

Why disclosure carries a real price.

Ordinary workplace stigma imposes a social cost. Founder concealment persists because the cost is also structural: board assessments, diligence questions, key-person framing and team confidence all read a disclosure as information about the company rather than about a person. CEREVITY treats that calculation as accurate rather than as a distortion to be argued out of.

A

The cost is structural, not only social

Ordinary stigma costs standing among colleagues, and standing recovers. What a founder is weighing is different in kind: a governance body that must form a view on executive capacity, an investor class that prices key-person risk explicitly, and a workforce whose retention depends on believing the company is fine. None of those audiences are being unkind. They are doing their jobs, and their jobs involve converting information about the founder into information about the asset.

B

One disclosure, several audiences

In most workplaces a person can tell a manager and stop there. A founder cannot reliably contain a disclosure to one room, because the rooms are connected: a board observer sits on three other boards, an investor's partner meeting discusses portfolio risk weekly, and an executive hired last quarter has a former colleague at a competitor. Founders are not being paranoid when they treat one conversation as potentially several.

C

The calculation is usually rational, which is the problem

Standard anti-stigma messaging assumes the fear is exaggerated and that correcting the belief unlocks help-seeking. For founders the belief is frequently accurate, so the message lands as naive and the silence holds. The useful move is not to dispute the arithmetic. It is to change the inputs, by making it possible to get treated without the disclosure ever entering the environments where it would be priced.

§03 / 09 / Mechanism

What concealment does to help-seeking.

Concealment does not remove the problem. It changes when founders reach care and what they are willing to say once they get there: presentations arrive later, symptoms are minimized at first contact, and unregulated coaching is often substituted for clinical treatment precisely because it generates no clinical record.

The first distortion is timing. A founder who has decided that disclosure is expensive will not seek care at the point where care is cheapest, which is early, when the pattern is still a sleep problem and a shortening fuse rather than a clinical presentation. They will seek it at the point where the alternative has become unmanageable, which is usually after a bad quarter, a co-founder separation, a down round, or a night that frightened them. By then the work is longer, because chronic activation has been running unopposed for two years and has recruited the body into the pattern. Sustained overwork that no longer responds to a week away is the territory of burnout treatment for executives, and it is markedly easier to treat before it has become the founder's baseline rather than their exception.

The second distortion happens inside the room. A founder who has spent three years managing what people know about their internal state does not switch that off because the door closed. First sessions with founders are frequently a performance of stability delivered to a clinician who has no way of knowing it, and the founder leaves with the accurate impression that nothing much happened. What breaks that loop is not more rapport-building; it is the founder knowing precisely who could ever see anything, and satisfying themselves about it before they start rather than testing it slowly over ten sessions. Flatness and dread that never interrupt the deck being built are still clinically real, and what depression looks like in a functioning professional is one of the most consistently under-recognized presentations in this population.

The third distortion is substitution. Faced with a cost calculation that makes clinical care look risky, founders reach for something that carries no clinical record: an executive coach, a peer group, a retreat, a founder dinner, or a prescription obtained through a channel that requires nothing more than a form. Some of that genuinely helps. None of it is treatment, and coaching in particular is unregulated, which is the actual reason it feels safer rather than any judgment about its usefulness. A coach cannot treat a depressive episode, and a peer group cannot hold a suicide risk assessment. Where the presenting problem is that every decision now takes three times as long and costs more than it used to, the relevant work is clinical treatment for decision fatigue, not another framework.

► Standard advice vs. CEREVITY's approach

Standard therapy

"Wait until performance visibly slips before treating anything"

CEREVITY

"Treat the pattern while it is still invisible from the outside"

Standard therapy

"Choose a coach because coaching leaves no clinical record"

CEREVITY

"Choose clinical care that is confidential by law and by design"

Standard therapy

"Pay cash for single unrepeated sessions in three different cities"

CEREVITY

"Work with one clinician who holds continuity and the whole picture"

► Standard insurance-based therapy vs. CEREVITY's specialized approach for Tech founders and startup CEOs
Standard insurance-based therapyCEREVITY's specialized approach
"Wait until performance visibly slips before treating anything""Treat the pattern while it is still invisible from the outside"
"Choose a coach because coaching leaves no clinical record""Choose clinical care that is confidential by law and by design"
"Pay cash for single unrepeated sessions in three different cities""Work with one clinician who holds continuity and the whole picture"

A break from the page

Confidentiality is a design requirement here, not a reassurance.

A first conversation is confidential and commits you to nothing. CEREVITY is a nationwide network of independent licensed clinicians working private-pay, with no insurance claim filed and no diagnosis submitted to a payer. If you would rather describe the situation before deciding anything, start with a private inquiry.

§04 / 09 / Cases

Common challenges we address.

The founder who is still shipping

The patternSleep broken at three every morning by runway arithmetic, a flat and joyless relationship to a company they were obsessed with two years ago, irritability with the executives they hired, and a private conviction that stopping would be indulgent. Board updates still go out on time, which is exactly why nobody has asked. Performance is intact and is functioning as camouflage.

What we addressThe work starts by separating the symptoms from the job, because the founder has usually fused them and concluded that treating one means abandoning the other. Regulating chronic activation comes first, then the beliefs about worth and output that keep the alarm on. Where exhaustion has stopped responding to time away entirely, this is the ground covered by senior leader burnout care.

The founder waiting until after the round

The patternA founder who agrees, sometimes readily, that something needs attention, and who has attached it to a milestone: after the raise closes, after the reorg, after the launch, after the audit. The milestone has moved four times. The deferral looks like discipline and is functioning as avoidance, and the founder can usually see both readings at once.

What we addressThe useful question is not whether the milestone is real but what would have to be true for the answer to ever be yes. Making the care itself invisible to the milestone removes most of the argument, which is why format and confidentiality get settled before content does. Where the isolation of holding all of this alone is the live problem, the entry point is treatment for isolation at the top.

§05 / 09 / Methods

Evidence-based treatment approaches.

CEREVITY clinicians select an approach after assessment rather than advertising one in advance. For founders, the approaches that come up most often address chronic physiological activation, the thinking that keeps a worry loop running, the relationship to internal experience, long-standing achievement patterns, and specific events that still intrude.

Modality 01

Cognitive behavioral therapy

The most extensively tested talking therapy, targeting the link between a thought, the feeling it produces and the behavior that follows, through structured exercises and tasks between sessions. For founders the usual targets are catastrophic forecasting about runway and headcount, the three-in-the-morning worry loop, and the rule that rest must be earned. Its structure suits people who want to know what they are committing to and what the sessions will consist of before they agree to them.

Modality 02

Acceptance and commitment therapy

A behavioral approach that works on the relationship to difficult internal experience rather than on its content, using values and committed action as the organizing frame. Founders who have already tried to argue themselves out of the dread, and who noticed that being right about the argument changed nothing, tend to get more traction here. The aim is psychological flexibility under uncertainty rather than the elimination of uncertainty, which is not on offer in a venture-backed company anyway.

Modality 03

Psychodynamic therapy

Explores the long-standing patterns, usually around achievement, control, worth and being needed, that determine how a person carries pressure and why setting it down feels prohibited rather than merely difficult. This is often where the concealment itself becomes the subject: not whether hiding was rational in a board meeting, which it may well have been, but where the reflex was learned, and what it is still costing in rooms where nothing is at stake.

Modality 04

Mindfulness-based approaches

Train attention and down-regulate the chronic activation that sits underneath fragmented sleep, reactivity and the sense of being permanently braced for the next thing. For founders these are frequently the first component that produces a noticeable change, because the physiological layer responds faster than the cognitive one and a founder who sleeps again has more capacity for everything else the work requires.

Modality 05

EMDR

Where a specific event still intrudes, EMDR helps the nervous system process it so it stops hijacking the present. For founders that event is rarely what a general clinician expects: a co-founder betrayal, a mass layoff the founder had to deliver personally, an acquisition that collapsed the week before signing, or a public failure that still produces a physical reaction when the company's name comes up. The memory is treated directly rather than reasoned about.

§06 / 09 / Investment

Understanding the investment in private-pay care.

Private-pay, nationwide, and built so the disclosure stays yours

At CEREVITY, our online individual therapy sessions are structured as a direct investment in your mental agility and overall well-being. The investment includes:

  • Licensed mental health professional specializing in confidential therapy for founders
  • Evidence-based, one-on-one approaches proven effective for anxiety, depression, and burnout
  • Flexible online scheduling including evenings and weekends
  • Complete privacy with no insurance involvement or red tape
  • Tech founders and startup CEOs expertise and understanding
  • Outcome tracking and progress measurement
View rates & investment options

The cost of founder mental health going unaddressed

Consider what is at stake when founder mental health goes unaddressed:

What private pay does and does not change

Working outside of insurance means no claim is filed for your care and no diagnosis is submitted to a payer, so no utilization reviewer reads your chart to decide whether treatment continues and no benefit administrator holds a copy of anything. What private pay does not mean is that no record exists. Your clinician keeps a clinical record, as every licensed clinician must, and the point is that the record is protected rather than absent. Under the HIPAA Privacy Rule, psychotherapy notes are held separately from the rest of the file and, with few exceptions, cannot be disclosed for any reason without your written authorization. The exceptions are narrow and worth knowing rather than glossing: principally a serious and imminent threat to your safety or another person's, state mandatory reporting duties, and orders a court can issue. View our current rates here: cerevity.com/our-pricing-for-therapy/.

Session formats that survive a founder's calendar

Care is delivered by secure telehealth nationwide across all 50 states, which removes the waiting room problem entirely for founders in cities where the ecosystem is small enough that a waiting room is a disclosure. Steady work usually sits in regular weekly appointments, while processing-heavy sessions and periods when a week has gone badly enough that an hour will not cover it are better served by extended 90-minute sessions. Founders whose travel makes a weekly slot unreliable often make more progress in fewer, longer appointments, and concentrated clinical work exists for exactly that constraint. Investors who want their portfolio founders to have this available without ever learning who used it can fund it through a founder mental health partnership that is deliberately blind to participation.

§07 / 09 / Evidence

What the research shows.

The honest summary is that prevalence and concealment have been measured by different researchers using different instruments, and only the first has been measured on founders at all. Freeman and colleagues, publishing in Small Business Economics in 2019, surveyed 242 entrepreneurs against 93 comparison subjects and reported that mental health differences affected 72% of the entrepreneurs directly or indirectly, composed of 49% reporting a personal lifetime history and 23% reporting family history alone. Within the same sample, depression was reported by 30%, ADHD by 29%, substance use by 12% and bipolar disorder by 11%, and 32% reported two or more conditions concurrently. Those are self-reported lifetime figures drawn from a modest sample with a small comparison group. That is worth saying plainly, because the number has since been quoted, rounded and re-verbed until it appears to describe a behavior nobody in that study counted.

► Three numbers, three different questions

72%

of entrepreneurs surveyed were affected by mental health differences directly or indirectly: 49% personal lifetime history plus 23% family history only. Self-reported prevalence, not concealment.

Small Business Economics, 2019

32%

median share of participants naming disclosure concerns as a barrier to help-seeking, the most frequently reported stigma barrier across 144 studies.

Psychological Medicine, 2015

50.6%

of the 59.3 million United States adults with any mental illness received treatment in the past year, leaving close to half untreated.

National Institute of Mental Health, 2022 data

Different samples, different instruments, different populations. These figures describe one pattern from three angles; they are not points on a single scale.

Concealment has its own literature, and it is considerably larger. Clement and colleagues, in Psychological Medicine, reviewed 144 studies covering more than 90,000 participants and found that stigma exerts a small to moderate negative effect on help-seeking, with disclosure concerns the most frequently reported barrier of any kind, cited by a median of roughly 32% of participants across a range running from 4% to 73%. The groups most deterred included men, military personnel and health professionals, all of them people whose occupational standing rests on being read as dependable. The downstream effect is visible in national figures: the National Institute of Mental Health reports that of the 59.3 million United States adults with any mental illness in 2022, 50.6% received treatment in the past year, leaving close to half untreated. Set against that, the World Health Organization estimates 12 billion working days lost globally every year to depression and anxiety, at a cost of one trillion United States dollars in lost productivity, and defines burn-out in ICD-11 as a syndrome resulting from chronic workplace stress that has not been successfully managed.

§§ / 09 / Recap

Key takeaways.

Five things to remember

  1. The 72% measures history, not secrecy Freeman and colleagues counted self-reported lifetime prevalence across 242 entrepreneurs: 49% personal history plus 23% family history only. No question in that survey asked who had been told.
  2. Concealment is a cost calculation, not a character flaw Board assessments, diligence, key-person framing and team confidence convert a founder's disclosure into information about the company. The calculation is usually correct, which is why arguing with it does not work.
  3. The delay is where the damage compounds Care sought at the point of crisis is longer and harder than care sought while the pattern is still a sleep problem. Performance is the last thing to fail and the worst possible trigger to wait for.
  4. Confidentiality has to be settled first Private-pay care means no claim filed and no diagnosis submitted to a payer, and psychotherapy notes carry additional protection under the HIPAA Privacy Rule. Knowing the exact limits beforehand is what makes an honest first session possible.
  5. CEREVITY provides this through online individual therapy nationwide, with full privacy through its private-pay concierge network and no insurance involvement.

§08 / 09 / FAQ

Frequently asked questions.

Do 72% of tech founders really hide a mental health crisis?

Founders who searched that number deserve the precise answer: no, that is not what the study measured. The 72% comes from Freeman and colleagues in Small Business Economics, 2019, a self-report survey of 242 entrepreneurs against 93 comparison subjects. It found that mental health differences affected 72% of the entrepreneurs directly or indirectly, combining 49% who reported a personal lifetime history with 23% who reported only a family history. Nothing in that instrument asked whether anyone had concealed anything from anyone. Concealment among founders is real and worth taking seriously, but it is evidenced by a different body of research, principally work on disclosure concerns as a barrier to help-seeking, and it should not be smuggled in under a prevalence figure.

Is therapy completely confidential?

Therapy is confidential by law and by professional obligation, with narrow exceptions that founders should know rather than assume. Under the HIPAA Privacy Rule, psychotherapy notes are kept separate from the rest of the record and, with few exceptions, cannot be disclosed for any purpose without your written authorization. The exceptions are principally a serious and imminent threat to your safety or someone else's, mandatory reporting duties that vary by state, and orders issued by a court. CEREVITY clinicians work private-pay, so no insurance claim is filed and no diagnosis is submitted to a payer, which removes the ordinary administrative routes by which health information travels. Confidential does not mean that no record exists. It means the record is protected and does not move without you.

What are the symptoms of founder burnout?

Founder burnout usually shows up first in sleep and last in output. The World Health Organization defines burn-out in ICD-11 as a syndrome resulting from chronic workplace stress that has not been successfully managed, with three dimensions: energy depletion or exhaustion, increased mental distance or cynicism about the job, and reduced professional efficacy. The recognizable founder version is waking at three in the morning to redo the runway math, a flattening of interest in a company you were obsessed with, irritability with the people you hired specifically to help, and decisions that take three times longer than they did a year ago while still, from the outside, getting made on schedule. Performance holding steady is not evidence that nothing is wrong.

Do I have to tell my board or my investors that I am in therapy?

No obligation requires founders to disclose therapy to a board, an investor or a co-founder. Therapy is medical care, and no reporting duty attaches to seeking it. CEREVITY clinicians work private-pay, which means no claim goes to an insurer and no diagnosis is submitted to a payer, so the routine administrative paths by which health information moves are simply not in play. What a founder eventually chooses to tell a board is a separate decision and deserves to be made deliberately. Many founders do disclose something later, once they are steady and the disclosure is a statement rather than an admission. Very few find that the middle of a difficult stretch is a good moment to decide it.

Is there such a thing as a therapist for startup founders?

Yes, and the useful distinction is fluency rather than a specialty label. CEREVITY is a nationwide network of independent licensed clinicians, and founders are matched with someone who already understands dilution, runway, board dynamics, the difference between a bridge and a down round, and what it means to be named the key person in a financing document. Fit matters here for a practical reason: founders who have to teach the room what their job involves tend to edit themselves while doing it, and the edited version is the one that ends up being treated. Nothing about a founder's presentation is clinically exotic. What is specific is the environment the symptoms are being managed inside, and how much that environment punishes being seen.

Does paying privately mean there is no record of my therapy?

No. Private pay changes who receives information about your care, not whether a record exists at all. Any licensed clinician keeps a clinical record, and CEREVITY clinicians are no exception to that. What private pay removes is the insurance route: no claim is filed, no diagnosis is submitted to a payer, no utilization reviewer reads your chart to authorize further sessions, and no benefit administrator holds a copy. The record that does exist sits with your clinician and is protected under the HIPAA Privacy Rule, which requires your written authorization before psychotherapy notes are disclosed, subject to narrow exceptions. Founders who are told that private pay means nothing is written down anywhere are being sold a promise no clinician can lawfully keep.

Will therapy show up in due diligence or a background check?

Therapy is protected health information and is not part of a standard background check or a commercial due-diligence file. Diligence examines the company: financials, cap table, contracts, litigation, employment matters, intellectual property. Health records are not producible to an investor on request, and founders are not obliged to volunteer them. The realistic exposure founders describe is not a document at all; it is a person. Something mentioned to a co-founder, a board observer, or an executive coach with no confidentiality obligation can travel in ways a clinical record cannot. CEREVITY works private-pay partly for that reason: fewer parties hold anything, and the ones who do are bound by law rather than by goodwill.

How does your private-pay pricing structure work?

As a private-pay concierge network, we offer structured investments in your mental health without the restrictions or privacy risks of insurance. You can review our full fee schedule and specific session lengths directly on our website. While this costs more than insurance copays, it provides the flexibility, total privacy, and highly specialized care that standard options cannot offer. View our current rates here.

How do you protect my privacy?

Privacy is foundational to our network. As a private-pay network, your sessions never appear on insurance records or EOBs that could be seen by employers, boards, or family members. We use HIPAA-compliant nationwide telehealth platforms, and you can attend sessions from anywhere with a private internet connection.

§09 / 09 / Begin

You do not have to be the only person who knows.

Whatever you decide to tell a board, a co-founder or nobody at all, that decision should not be the reason you go untreated. CEREVITY is a nationwide network of independent licensed clinicians providing confidential, private-pay care across all 50 states. Call (562) 295-6650 or send a private inquiry.

Available by appointment 7 days a week, 8 AM to 8 PM (PST)

§§ / Author

About Emily Carter, PhD.

Emily Carter, PhD

Emily Carter, PhD

Dr. Carter is a Licensed Psychologist specializing in therapy for executives, entrepreneurs, and high-achieving professionals. Her work integrates cognitive behavioral therapy, acceptance and commitment therapy, and attachment-informed approaches calibrated to the demands of high-responsibility careers. She sees clients via CEREVITY's nationwide telehealth network. View full bio →

CredentialPhD, Licensed Psychologist
Years in practice10+ years
SpecializationTherapy for executives, entrepreneurs, and high-achieving professionals
ModalitiesCBT, ACT, attachment-informed, mindfulness-based
Author licensureLicensed by the California Board of Psychology
Who you would seeA clinician independently licensed in your own state, through CEREVITY's nationwide network across all 50 states

§§ / Sources

References.

  1. Small Business Economics. The prevalence and co-occurrence of psychiatric conditions among entrepreneurs and their families. 2019. link.springer.com
  2. Psychological Medicine (Cambridge University Press). What is the impact of mental health-related stigma on help-seeking? A systematic review of quantitative and qualitative studies. 2015. cambridge.org
  3. National Institute of Mental Health. Mental Illness. 2024. nimh.nih.gov
  4. World Health Organization. Mental health at work. 2024. who.int
  5. U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Office for Civil Rights. HIPAA Privacy Rule and Sharing Information Related to Mental Health. 2017. hhs.gov
  6. CEREVITY. Executive burnout therapy. cerevity.com/executive-burnout-therapy
  7. CEREVITY. Leadership isolation therapy. cerevity.com/leadership-isolation-therapy
  8. CEREVITY. High-functioning anxiety and depression therapy. cerevity.com/anxiety-and-depression-therapy

⚠ Crisis resources

If you are experiencing a mental health crisis or having thoughts of suicide, please reach out immediately. 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline · Call or text 988 Crisis Text Line · Text HOME to 741741 National Alliance on Mental Illness · 1-800-950-NAMI (6264)

A nationwide private-pay concierge network of independent licensed clinicians.
© 2026 CEREVITY · (562) 295-6650