Founders and Depression
What it looked like from the inside, and why I'm sharing it
A few weeks ago, a message went out on a founder WhatsApp group that we recently lost one of our own: a founder, a builder, one of the brave ones who chose to create something instead of standing on the sidelines. I’m so sorry for that loss. And it moved me to share something I don’t talk about often. It took me many years to acknowledge that I was living with low-grade chronic depression.
Part of why it took me so long to recognize what was happening is that my experience didn’t match what I thought depression looked like.
I wasn’t blue or hopeless. I wasn’t immobile or in danger. From the outside, I was a highly productive leader who had things together. But on the inside, I felt irritable, trapped, joyless, dry. Like most things were harder than they should be. Like the good stuff was always just around the corner, but almost never right here.
I was a successful, funny, and charismatic leader. But I was struggling on the inside, and I didn’t even realize how much.
That gap between how things looked and how they felt is exactly what makes this kind of depression so easy to miss and so hard to name.
I tried a lot of things to rebalance. Some of them helped, for a while.
Therapy (several kinds) was genuinely useful. But it wasn’t enough on its own. There was a gravitational pull that kept dragging me back down, and talk alone couldn’t lift it.
Lifestyle change was also helpful, but not enough. I learned to count my work hours and place limits on my insatiable drive to succeed. I learned to go to sleep 7 hours most nights. I learned to take a full day off every week. But most of those habits eroded over time, only to be reset again and again.
The breakthrough for me was medication. An antidepressant helped me rebalance my brain chemistry in a way that nothing else had. It didn’t change who I was. It gave me more consistent access to the life really want to live.
I still take it. And I don’t say that quietly or with apology. Maybe it hasn’t literally saved my life. But it has helped me enjoy more of it, more consistently, for years now.
Why this matters for founders specifically.
The founder identity makes this harder to see and harder to admit. We are supposed to be resilient. We chose this. We sign up for the hard thing on purpose. Struggling feels like a character flaw rather than a health condition.
But the pressure of building something, the uncertainty, the loneliness, the relentlessness of it, creates real conditions for mental health challenges. And the version that shows up in high-functioning people often doesn’t look like a crisis. It looks like irritability, flatness, persistent distraction, and a creeping sense that something is off though you can’t quite name it.
If that sounds familiar, I want you to know: you are not alone, and you are not weak. You might just need support that matches what’s actually happening in your body and your brain.
If you’re in that place.
Please reach out to someone. A therapist, a doctor, a trusted person in your life. If you want to talk to someone who has been through it and understands the founder-specific version of the struggle, my DMs are open.
We make it through this by being honest with each other. That starts with someone going first.
In memory of David
If you’d like to support the family he left behind, please consider contributing to the GoFundMe set up in his honor.