KATE’S STORY

After experiencing 15 years of disabling mental illness, chronic psychotic breaks, enumerable psychiatric hospitalizations, and a suicide attempt, Kate was told by doctors that the only way she would survive was to live in a long-term, locked psychiatric ward. Kate, stubborn to her core and no stranger to defying the expectations of her care team, told them to go to hell. Of course, she needed a care team to survive, and no 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 to not end up in a ward, she met with a trauma therapist known for his intense behavioral methodologies and celebrated diagnostic abilities. 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. 

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 therapy and cognitive behavioral therapy to tackle her OCD, Panic Disorder, Social Anxiety Disorder, and PTSD. Slowly, she began to grow beyond the confines of her psychosis-induced agoraphobia. Day after day, Kate leaned into the discomfort of her fear and though terrified, she continued to do exactly what the doctor prescribed anyway.

Over the next year, Kate found a job, fell in love with her now husband Dave, and got Waffle, the puppy she would train to be her medical alert service dog. Now, nine years later, she is happy, well(ish), married, and has transitioned into public mental health work after her five-year tenure as the CEO of The Dogist, where she scaled the company’s audience to five million subscribers. She is currently working with Harvard, Dartmouth, and UVM to scale public health campaigns that help today’s youth while finalizing her first memoir and building out Mental Health is Cool. Her hope for the future is to use social media for good instead of the bottom line and scale academic-creator collaborations that reach young people online where they get their information. This is just the beginning of that work and though she is unsure of where exactly it will take her, one thing’s for sure – even though her doctors were convinced that she would only survive in a locked ward, she proved them spectacularly wrong.

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If you are interested in hearing Kate’s entire story, this podcast shares her entire lived experience with mental illness and the many adventures she lived along the way.