KATE’S STORY

After experiencing 15 years of disabling mental illness, intermittent psychosis, 21 psychiatric hospitalizations, and a suicide attempt, Kate was told that the only way she would survive was to live in a long-term, residential, locked psychiatric ward. Kate, stubborn to her core and no stranger to defying odds and expectations, told her care team to go to hell.

Of course, she needed a care team to survive, and no local doctor was willing to work with her due to the severity of her condition. But she didn’t give up. She met with doctor after doctor, and even after being told that she needed residential care by all of them, she kept searching. In one last-ditch effort, she met with a trauma therapist known for his intense behavioral therapy methodologies. While other doctors barely made it through a session with Kate before discontinuing treatment, this doctor listened intently for four sessions before he offered Kate a choice – to work the hardest she had ever worked in her life and do behavioral therapy precisely as he prescribed it or to go to residential treatment and live her life in a locked psychiatric ward. 

Kate didn’t think twice about it. She committed to the work and began the recovery of a lifetime. She worked relentlessly using disciplined exposure response prevention therapy and cognitive behavioral therapy to tackle her agoraphobia, OCD, Panic Disorder, Social Anxiety Disorder, and PTSD. Day after day, Kate leaned into the discomfort of her fear and though terrified, she continued to do exactly what the doctor prescribed anyway. Slowly, she began to grow beyond the confines of her psychosis-induced agoraphobia, and the hard work paid off. Over the next two years, Kate found a job, fell in love with her now husband Dave, got Waffle, the puppy she trained to be her psychiatric service dog, and began unabashedly sharing her story of life with serious mental illness online.

Now, ten years later, she is happy, well(ish), married, and has an online community of over 175,000 across social media and Substack. She has also transitioned from social media marketing and running The Dogist, an internationally renowned social media company to public mental health work — the work she dreamt of doing since being diagnosed with major depressive disorder at age 16.

Currently, she works at the Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health building out its revolutionary Creator Program, an academic-creator alliance that disseminates public health campaigns online and scales the dissemination of evidence-based health information through creator networks. In addition to her work at Harvard, Kate writes the Substack Bestseller — Healing Out Loud — which explores her lived experience with serious mental illness and unpacks mental health, its culture, and serious mental illness recovery beyond the biomedical model.

Her hope for this chapter of her career is to use social media for good instead of the bottom line and teach young people that recovery from serious mental illness really is possible and worth the hard work it takes. Although she is unsure of where exactly her work will take her from here, one thing’s for sure – even though her doctors were convinced she would only survive in a locked psychiatric ward, she proved them spectacularly wrong.

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If you are interested in learning more about Kate’s story, watch her TEDx talk and listen to this podcast where she shares her entire lived experience with serious mental illness and the many adventures she lived along the way.