Therapist Insights / Founder Mental Health
Your cofounder needs help and will not say so.
Something has changed in the person you built this with. They are quieter, or sharper, or gone by two in the afternoon, and every version of asking sounds either patronizing or like a performance review. This is written for the one doing the worrying: what you can honestly observe, how to say it once without wrecking the partnership, and where your control actually ends.
THE QUICK TAKEAWAY
Founders watching a cofounder come apart cannot diagnose what is happening, and the honest starting point is to stop trying. What is observable is change from that person's own baseline: withdrawal from the parts of the job they used to want, decisions that stop getting made, volatility that was never there, absence that stops getting explained. Raised well, it is one private, specific, unhurried observation with no audience and no link to performance or equity. What happens next is not yours to decide. CEREVITY clinicians work with the founder who is worried at least as often as with the one everybody is worried about.
§01 / 09 / Definition
What you can actually see.
Cofounders can observe change and cannot observe cause. Withdrawal from the parts of the job someone used to seek out, decisions left open for weeks, uncharacteristic volatility and unexplained absence are all real signals, and not one of them names a condition. CEREVITY clinicians treat that distinction as the starting point rather than a caveat.
Nobody hands you a clean signal. What arrives instead is a slow accumulation of small differences in a person you know well enough to notice them. The cofounder who used to reply inside ten minutes now takes two days, and only to the easy threads. The one who fought you hard on hiring standards agrees to everything. The one who was unflappable in front of customers snaps at an account manager over a formatting error. None of that is evidence of a condition. All of it is evidence of change, and change from a person's own baseline is the only thing you are genuinely positioned to see. You do not know whether you are looking at a marriage coming apart, a parent in hospital, a medication that stopped working, three months of four-hour nights, a drinking problem, a depressive episode, or eleven bad weeks that will pass on their own. Those produce overlapping surfaces from the outside and they need completely different responses. Sorting between them takes an assessment by somebody qualified to make it, and that assessment is how a clinician separates ordinary pressure from an anxiety or mood disorder, which is not something anyone can do from the other side of a shared calendar. Holding that line is not squeamishness. It is the difference between a conversation your cofounder can accept and one they have to defend against. One thing overrides all of the above. If there is any indication of suicidal thinking, a remark about not being around, a sense that everyone would be better off, a sudden unexplained calm after weeks of visible distress, then this stops being a subject to raise carefully at the right moment. Immediate risk needs immediate help the same day, from a crisis line or emergency services, and the resources listed at the foot of this page exist for exactly that. Raising it badly and being wrong costs you an awkward hour. Waiting for a better moment can cost something you do not get back.
Six changes you can name without diagnosing anything
Withdrawal from the parts they used to want
Not from work in general, which rarely stops. From the specific pieces this person used to seek out: the customer calls, the whiteboard argument, the Friday demo. Interest narrowing down to whatever is unavoidable is worth noticing precisely because total output can hold steady while it happens.
Decisions that stop getting made
Open questions that would once have closed in a day now sit for three weeks. Nothing is refused, which is what makes it so hard to raise. Things are deferred, restated, sent back for more data, until the company quietly routes around the person and nobody says why.
Volatility that was not there before
A short fuse in someone who never had one. Disproportionate reactions to small process failures, or a flatness where there used to be reaction at all. Both directions count, and the direction matters far less than the fact that it is new for this particular person.
Absence that stops getting explained
Late arrivals, camera off, a whole day gone with no message. Founders miss things constantly and normally over-explain it, because the culture runs on visible effort. When the explaining stops, something has changed about how much the explaining costs.
The work ships and nothing else does
Board deck on time, invoices out, release cut. Meanwhile birthdays are missed, the gym membership lapsed in the spring, and the friends have stopped being mentioned at all. High performers protect the visible output last, which is why performance is the least reliable screening instrument available to you.
A change in how alcohol sits in the week
Not a quantity anyone can audit, and not an accusation to make. A shift: earlier, alone where it used to be social, or a defensiveness about the subject that was absent a year ago. Worth noticing. Not worth turning into a verdict.
▶ Research
Set two published findings side by side and the silence stops looking like a personality trait. The 2016 National Academies report on stigma states that a substantial body of research has shown a negative relationship between stigma and help-seeking, and identifies men and health professionals among the groups in whom that effect is strongest. National Institute of Mental Health figures for 2022 record 23.1 percent of United States adults living with any mental illness, of whom 50.6 percent received mental health treatment in the past year, split 41.6 percent of men against 56.9 percent of women. Roughly half of the people who would meet criteria are not in care at all, and the shortfall concentrates in the demographic most founding teams are built from. A cofounder who is struggling and not being treated for it is the ordinary case rather than the alarming exception.1
What the silence does
The gap is in treatment, not in recognition
Most people who are unwell have some idea that they are unwell. What stops is the next step. Half of United States adults with any mental illness were not treated for it in the year the National Institute of Mental Health last measured, and the male figure sits fifteen points below the female one. Assuming your cofounder simply has not noticed is usually the least likely explanation available.
Pressure and disorder look identical from outside
Every founder is tired and tiredness is not the question. The question is whether it clears. Depletion lifts when the load lifts; a depressive episode does not, and neither does an anxiety disorder that has stopped respecting the boundary it started at. From the outside those are indistinguishable for months, which is why the difference between tiredness and clinical burnout is a clinical question rather than one you can resolve with a theory and eight months of observation.
Certainty never arrives, and waiting for it is itself a decision
Most people in this position keep collecting evidence, because saying something while you might be wrong feels reckless and saying nothing feels like restraint. The data is not coming. Your cofounder is not going to volunteer it and you are never going to be sure. The real choice is between speaking imperfectly now and staying quiet while the situation resolves itself in a way neither of you chose.
Who carries this with you
A cofounder in trouble is not a private matter that happens to take place at work. The load redistributes immediately, mostly onto you, and the reason you are suddenly doing two jobs is the one thing you cannot explain to anybody. More work and less permission to describe it is the particular isolation that the top of a company manufactures, and it is not a mood that can be pushed through indefinitely.
You, first and hardest
Every dropped thread lands on your desk and you cannot delegate the reason. You are covering, protecting and translating for a person you are also frightened for, and none of that appears anywhere in an account of what you did this week.
The people who report to both of you
Teams read a split at the top faster than any announcement travels. When one founder becomes unreachable and the other becomes strange about it, good people update their assumptions in private and start returning recruiter calls.
Whoever you go home to
The second job comes out of somewhere and it is almost always the hours at home. Partners absorb another company's worth of work they never agreed to, which is where the work of staying connected when both calendars are run by other people becomes relevant to the person doing the worrying rather than to the person being worried about.
§02 / 09 / Telehealth
Why they will not say it.
Cofounders in trouble usually stay quiet for reasons that are rational rather than stubborn. Disclosure at this level is read by boards, investors and staff as information about the company, and stigma has a measured suppressing effect on help-seeking that falls hardest on men. Silence is the predictable outcome, not a character defect.
Disclosure is not neutral information at this level
An employee who says they are struggling is using an entitlement. A founder who says it is generating an event. A board hears a risk item, a lead investor hears a diligence footnote, and a leadership team hears a forecast about whether the company is fine. That calculation is not paranoia, and it is most of the reason the answer to are you okay is always yes.
Stigma suppresses help-seeking in measurable ways
The 2016 National Academies report Ending Discrimination Against People with Mental and Substance Use Disorders states that a substantial body of research has shown a negative relationship between stigma and help-seeking, and names the groups in whom the effect is most pronounced. Men are on that list, alongside health professionals, military service members, youth and racial and ethnic minorities. Founding teams are not exempt from a pattern that broad.
Their own explanation is accurate and incomplete
Ask any founder why they are exhausted and the answer will be true: the raise, the reorg, the customer that churned, the two hires who did not work out. Nothing in it is a lie. What it leaves out is whether the exhaustion lifts when the cause stops, and that single question is what separates a hard stretch from something with a name and a treatment.
§03 / 09 / Mechanism
How to raise it once.
Cofounders get roughly one credible attempt at this, and the version that works names a specific observed change rather than an assessment of the person. Privately, once, with nobody else in the room, and with no thread connecting it to performance, the round or equity. Tying it to consequences is the fastest way to lose the conversation entirely.
The whole thing turns on the first sentence, and the first sentence should contain an observation and nothing else. You have noticed that the pricing decision has been open since January. You have noticed that they have not been on a customer call in six weeks, which is not like them. You have noticed that they were not at the offsite dinner and did not mention it afterwards. Every one of those is a fact about behavior that the other person can either confirm, correct or explain, and none of them requires them to accept a story about themselves before they can reply. Compare that to what most people actually open with, which is a conclusion wearing a question mark: are you depressed, do you think you might be burned out, have you considered that this might be more than stress. Those hand your cofounder a label to reject, and rejecting the label is far easier than examining the thing underneath it. The conversation ends politely, both of you feel worse, and the subject becomes radioactive for the next year. Say the observation, then stop talking. The silence after it is the part that does the work, and most people cannot tolerate more than four seconds of it before they start filling it with reassurance.
The setting matters almost as much as the sentence. Privately means privately: not in front of a third founder, not with the head of people sitting in to make it official, not on a call with a calendar invite titled catch-up that everyone can see. Once means once. The instinct after a flat response is to raise it again the following week with better arguments, and that instinct converts concern into pressure, which is the thing most likely to produce a formal denial that then has to be defended. Keep the timing away from anything with consequences attached. The week the numbers miss is the worst possible week, because whatever you say will be heard as a judgment about capability, and so is the week the term sheet lands, the week someone senior resigns, and any conversation that touches vesting, roles or title. If your genuine concern and a live governance question have to happen in the same quarter, hold them in separate rooms on separate days, and never let the second one borrow the emotional weight of the first. One more thing to hand over rather than argue: normalize the idea that people in this seat get support routinely and quietly, whether that is confidential clinical work built around running a company or simply a name and a phone number that they can use without telling you they used it.
Then comes the part almost nobody writes down, which is that this is where your control ends. You cannot make an adult get treatment. You can raise it, you can make it easy, you can remove the excuses about time and cost and finding someone decent, and after that the decision belongs entirely to them, including the decision to do nothing. Pushing past that point does not produce care. It produces a defended position, a partnership with a new fault line running through it, and a person who now has one fewer safe listener than they had before you started. What remains yours is not small. It is your own boundaries, which means deciding what you will and will not carry on their behalf and saying so plainly rather than absorbing it silently and resenting it later. It is your own workload, which has probably grown by a third without anybody acknowledging it. And it is whether you get support for yourself, which is the piece people in your position defer indefinitely on the grounds that they are not the one with the problem. Structured one-to-one clinical work for the person doing the worrying is not a consolation prize for failing to fix somebody else. It is the only part of this situation you can actually act on.
► Standard advice vs. CEREVITY's approach
Standard therapy
"Open with what you think is wrong with them"
CEREVITY
"Open with the specific thing you noticed, then stop talking"
Standard therapy
"Bring it up with a third founder there so it carries weight"
CEREVITY
"Say it once, privately, with nobody else in the room"
Standard therapy
"Attach it to the missed quarter or the vesting conversation"
CEREVITY
"Keep it away from performance, funding and equity entirely"
| Standard insurance-based therapy | CEREVITY's specialized approach |
|---|---|
| "Open with what you think is wrong with them" | "Open with the specific thing you noticed, then stop talking" |
| "Bring it up with a third founder there so it carries weight" | "Say it once, privately, with nobody else in the room" |
| "Attach it to the missed quarter or the vesting conversation" | "Keep it away from performance, funding and equity entirely" |
A break from the page
The half you can carry is your own.
A first conversation is confidential, commits you to nothing, and does not have to be about them. CEREVITY is a nationwide network of independent licensed clinicians working private-pay, with no insurance claim submitted and no diagnosis on a payer record. If you have been running two jobs and worrying about a third thing, start with a private inquiry.
§04 / 09 / Cases
Common challenges we address.
The cofounder who says they are fine and means it
The patternThe observation lands, they hear it, and the answer is genuinely sincere: it has been a brutal quarter, things will settle after the raise, everybody is running hot. There is no defensiveness to push against and nothing further to say. Six weeks later nothing has changed except that the subject now has a history and is harder to open.
What we addressNothing here calls for a second attempt with better evidence. What helps is leaving a door propped rather than knocked on: a specific name, a link, an offer that stands without expiry, and one sentence making clear that you will not raise it again unless they do. Where what they are carrying turns out to be dread attached to real consequences rather than to temperament, the relevant clinical territory is when the stakes are real and the anxiety is too, and that is a distinction only an assessment can draw.
The cofounder who agrees, and then nothing happens
The patternThey take it well, they say you are probably right, and they mean it in the moment. Then nothing moves for four months. Founders in this position are rarely lying. They are imagining an open-ended commitment with no defined end, a weekly obligation that collides with a calendar they do not control, and a paper trail somewhere they cannot see.
What we addressEvery one of those obstacles is answerable with specifics rather than encouragement. Knowing how long people typically stay in treatment and how often they meet removes the imagined life sentence. Private-pay removes the record. Evening and early slots remove the calendar collision. Your job is to make the first step small enough that inertia stops being the deciding factor, and then to stop managing it, because a course of therapy someone attends to keep a cofounder happy tends not to survive contact with the second month.
§05 / 09 / Methods
Evidence-based treatment approaches.
Suggestions from a worried cofounder land best when they are concrete and small: a name, a link, an offer to hold the calendar, rather than an instruction to get help. CEREVITY clinicians select an approach after assessment, and the five below cover most of what founders in this situation are eventually offered, on either side of the partnership.
Assessment before anything gets a name
The first appointment is not treatment. It establishes what is actually present, which is the question neither founder can answer from inside the company: depletion that will lift with recovery, a depressive episode, an anxiety disorder, a sleep disorder, a substance problem, or more than one of those at once. Everything else depends on that answer, and guessing at it from across a desk has already been tried.
Cognitive behavioral therapy
Structured, time-limited work on the link between what a person concludes, what they feel and what they then do. It suits founders because it has a shape, a duration and something to measure, which answers the objection that therapy is an open-ended commitment with no defined end. It is also the most extensively tested talking treatment for the anxiety and low mood that sit underneath most of these presentations.
Motivational work on ambivalence
Built for exactly the position a reluctant cofounder occupies: half aware something is wrong, half certain that naming it makes it real. Rather than arguing someone into change, the work surfaces the person's own reasons and lets the ambivalence be examined instead of defended. It is frequently what makes the difference between a single exploratory appointment and a course of treatment that continues.
Psychodynamic and exploratory work
Less structured by design, and often the right choice when the same pattern keeps returning despite everything sensible having been said about it. For founders the recurring material is usually older than the company: what rest would prove, whose approval the pace is still being run for, and why admitting a limit feels like conceding something permanent about who you are.
Individual work for the person doing the worrying
A separate course, for the cofounder who is not the identified problem and has been carrying the overflow for a year. The content is specific: where the boundary sits, what is genuinely yours to hold, how to say no to a partner who is unwell without feeling like you abandoned them, and what to do with the anger that almost always turns up underneath the concern.
§06 / 09 / Investment
Understanding the investment in private-pay care.
Private-pay, nationwide, and open to whichever of you moves first
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 clinical care for founders and the people who build with them
- Evidence-based, one-on-one approaches proven effective for anxiety, depression, burnout, and isolation
- Flexible online scheduling including evenings and weekends
- Complete privacy with no insurance involvement or red tape
- Founders and cofounders expertise and understanding
- Outcome tracking and progress measurement
The cost of cofounder distress going unaddressed
Consider what is at stake when cofounder distress goes unaddressed:
What private-pay changes when the record is the obstacle
Working outside of insurance means no claim submitted, no diagnosis on a payer record, no utilization reviewer deciding how many appointments are enough, and nothing that surfaces in a disclosure schedule during diligence. For a founder whose real objection is the paper trail rather than the money, that removes the objection entirely, and it is worth saying out loud when you pass the name along. View our current rates here: cerevity.com/our-pricing-for-therapy/.
Formats that survive a founder's week
Care is delivered by secure telehealth nationwide across all 50 states, with early, late and between-meeting slots rather than a single fixed hour on a Thursday afternoon. Ongoing work usually settles into the standard 50-minute rhythm. Where a single hour keeps ending in the middle of the difficult part, what it feels like to stop watching the clock halfway through a conversation is the more honest format, and founders whose travel makes a weekly slot fictional often start with a 3-hour intensive and move to a regular cadence afterwards.
§07 / 09 / Evidence
What the research shows.
Four things in the published record matter more than the rest for someone in this position. The first is scale. The World Health Organization's 2022 guidelines on mental health at work estimate that 15 percent of working-age adults have a mental disorder at any point in time, and put the cost of depression and anxiety to the global economy at one trillion United States dollars each year, driven predominantly by lost productivity. Those same guidelines recommend training for managers in mental health, which is a useful signal about what the evidence supports and what it does not: the recommended skill is recognizing distress and responding supportively, not identifying a condition. The second is the treatment gap. National Institute of Mental Health figures for 2022 record 23.1 percent of United States adults with any mental illness, of whom 50.6 percent received mental health treatment in the past year, with 41.6 percent of men in care against 56.9 percent of women. Roughly half of the people who would meet criteria are not being treated, and the shortfall is concentrated in the demographic most founding teams are made of.
► What the published figures record
of United States adults with any mental illness received mental health treatment in the past year.
National Institute of Mental Health, 2022 data
of men with any mental illness were treated, against 56.9 percent of women.
National Institute of Mental Health, 2022 data
of 242 surveyed entrepreneurs reported depression, more than the 93 comparison participants.
Small Business Economics, 2019
The third is why that gap persists. The 2016 National Academies report Ending Discrimination Against People with Mental and Substance Use Disorders states that a substantial body of research has shown a negative relationship between stigma and help-seeking, and names men, health professionals, military service members, youth and racial and ethnic minorities as the groups in whom the effect is most pronounced. The same report records that people who have disclosed their experiences report lower levels of self-stigma, while adding that disclosure has to happen in a safe and strategic manner to be beneficial. That is a fair description of what one private conversation with a trusted cofounder can offer and what a leadership meeting cannot. The fourth concerns the population itself. A 2019 self-report survey published in Small Business Economics compared 242 entrepreneurs with 93 comparison participants and found entrepreneurs reporting more depression at 30 percent, more attention deficit hyperactivity disorder at 29 percent, more substance use at 12 percent and more bipolar disorder at 11 percent than comparison participants, with 32 percent reporting two or more conditions and 18 percent reporting three or more. Self-report has obvious limits and a single survey is not a base rate. What it does not support is any picture in which founders are unusually protected.
§§ / 09 / Recap
Key takeaways.
Six things to remember
- Observe the change, do not name the condition Withdrawal, stalled decisions, new volatility and unexplained absence are real and reportable. What they are caused by is not visible from where you stand, and asserting a cause is what turns a conversation your cofounder can accept into one they have to defend against.
- Silence at this level is rational, not stubborn Disclosure by a founder is read as information about the company by everybody who receives it, and stigma independently suppresses help-seeking, most strongly in men. Expect quiet, plan around it, and do not treat it as evidence that nothing is wrong.
- Once, privately, with nothing attached One specific observation, no audience, and no connection to the missed quarter, the round or the equity table. Raising it repeatedly converts concern into pressure, and pressure reliably produces a denial that then has to be maintained.
- You cannot make an adult get treatment You can raise it, make it easy and remove the practical excuses. After that the decision is theirs, including the decision to do nothing. Pushing past that line costs the relationship without producing care, which leaves them with one fewer safe listener than before.
- Immediate risk is a different situation entirely Any indication of suicidal thinking is not something to raise gently at the right moment. That needs help the same day, from a crisis line or emergency services, and acting on a suspicion you turn out to be wrong about is the cheapest mistake available here.
- 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.
How do you tell someone they need therapy?
Cofounders who handle this well do not tell anybody they need therapy. They describe one specific change they have noticed and then stop talking. The pricing decision has been open since January. You have not been on a customer call in six weeks. You were not at the dinner and did not mention it. Each of those is a fact the other person can confirm, correct or explain, and none of them asks them to accept a diagnosis before they can respond. Opening with a conclusion, however gently phrased, hands the other person a label to reject, and rejecting a label is much easier than looking at what sits underneath it. CEREVITY clinicians consistently find that the observation plus silence does more than any script.
How do you help someone who refuses therapy?
Refusal is a boundary rather than a problem to be solved, and founders take longer than most to accept that. What remains available is making the path shorter: a specific clinician's name instead of a general suggestion, an explanation of what private-pay removes from the record, and an honest answer about how long a course typically runs. What is not available is repetition. Raising it every few weeks with better arguments converts concern into pressure, and pressure produces a defended position rather than an appointment. If your cofounder does refuse, the useful move is to redirect the effort toward your own boundaries and your own support, because those are the two things in this situation that actually respond to your input.
Can you force someone to go to therapy?
No competent adult can be compelled into therapy by a cofounder, a board, a partner or an employer, and any attempt to engineer it usually backfires. Involuntary treatment exists in narrow circumstances involving immediate danger, it is a legal and clinical process rather than something a business partner arranges, and it is not the situation most people asking this question are in. What founders can do is remove obstacles: cost, time, privacy and the difficulty of finding somebody credible. Beyond that, treatment entered under duress tends not to survive the second month, so a course of therapy someone attends to keep you quiet is not the outcome you actually wanted.
What are the signs someone is struggling with their mental health at work?
Changes from a person's own baseline are the only reliable indicator, and they matter far more than any general list. For founders that usually means withdrawal from the specific parts of the job they used to seek out, decisions that stay open for weeks without ever being refused, uncharacteristic irritability or an unusual flatness, absence that stops getting explained, and a life outside the company that has quietly emptied while output holds steady. Performance is the worst screening instrument available, because high performers protect the visible work last. None of these signs identifies a condition. They identify that something has changed, which is a completely different and much more defensible claim.
How do I talk to my business partner about their mental health?
Business partners deserve the same conversation anybody else does, with two extra constraints. Keep it away from anything with consequences attached, which means not in the week the numbers miss, not alongside a discussion of roles or equity, and not with a third founder present to give it weight. And keep it to one attempt. Name the change you have seen, say you are not trying to diagnose anything, offer something concrete such as a name or a link, and make clear that you will not raise it again unless they want to. Founders often report that the offer with no expiry date is what eventually got used, months after the conversation itself appeared to go nowhere.
What if I am wrong and there is nothing going on?
Cofounders who raise this and turn out to be mistaken pay a very small price, provided they raised it as an observation rather than a verdict. Saying that you noticed six weeks without a customer call cannot really be wrong, because it either happened or it did not, and the other person gets to supply the context. Saying that you think they are depressed can be wrong, and it is the version that damages things. Being over-cautious carries its own cost that people tend not to price: the average delay between someone becoming unwell and someone finally saying something is measured in months, and most of that delay is other people waiting to be certain.
What should I do if I think my cofounder might be suicidal?
Any indication of suicidal thinking changes the situation completely and removes the careful timing this article otherwise recommends. Founders in that position should not wait for a better moment, an offsite or a quieter week. Ask directly and plainly, stay with the person if you can, and use the crisis resources listed at the foot of this page or emergency services the same day. Warning signs published by the National Institute of Mental Health include talking about wanting to die, feeling trapped or hopeless, unbearable pain, withdrawing and saying goodbye, giving away important items, extreme mood swings and taking dangerous risks, particularly where the behavior is new or has increased recently. Being wrong about this is not a real cost.
Should I be in therapy myself if my cofounder is the one struggling?
Founders who spend a year covering for a partner usually arrive at their own first appointment describing somebody else, and then spend the hour on themselves. Carrying an extra job, protecting a person from the board, absorbing the anxiety of not knowing how bad it is and being unable to discuss any of it with staff, investors or the partner themselves is a considerable load with no legitimate outlet. Your own work is not a consolation prize for failing to fix them. It is where the boundary gets set, where the anger underneath the concern gets somewhere to go, and where you decide what you will keep carrying rather than discovering the answer by running out.
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 cannot do this for them.
Worrying about a cofounder is not a reason to go without support yourself, and for a lot of founders it is what finally prompts it. 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 Martha Fernandez, LCSW.
Martha Fernandez, LCSW
Martha Fernandez, LCSW is Co-Founder of CEREVITY and a Licensed Clinical Social Worker licensed in California, seeing clients by telehealth nationwide through CEREVITY's network of independent licensed clinicians. USC-trained and bilingual in English and Spanish, she works with founders, executives, attorneys and pilots on burnout, anxiety and depression in high performers, on trauma, grief and high-stakes transitions, and on couples and relationship strain under pressure. Her clinical work draws on cognitive behavioral therapy, acceptance and commitment therapy, behavioral activation, and narrative and solution-focused approaches. She is the author of Wired to Burn. View full bio →
§§ / Sources
References.
- National Institute of Mental Health. Mental Illness. 2023. nimh.nih.gov
- National Institute of Mental Health. Warning Signs of Suicide. 2024. nimh.nih.gov
- World Health Organization. Guidelines on mental health at work. 2022. who.int
- National Academies Press. Understanding Stigma of Mental and Substance Use Disorders, in Ending Discrimination Against People with Mental and Substance Use Disorders: The Evidence for Stigma Change. 2016. ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
- Small Business Economics. The prevalence and co-occurrence of psychiatric conditions among entrepreneurs and their families. 2019. link.springer.com
- CEREVITY. High-functioning anxiety and depression therapy. cerevity.com/anxiety-and-depression-therapy
- CEREVITY. Executive burnout therapy. cerevity.com/executive-burnout-therapy
- CEREVITY. Couples therapy. cerevity.com/couples-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)
