The thing that helped me most in my recovery was not medication nor therapy (though I want to note that those were absolutely helpful to overcome my rock bottom). It was helping someone else.
I want to explain why. And I want to show you that this is not just my story. The science backs it up.
A life is measured by how much you help
I meet a lot of startup mentors. I run Wondi, and good advice is hard to find, so I go looking for it.
Bob Moesta offered to mentor us. My co-founder met him through a class at MIT. He has already built several successful companies, and he told me he would meet our founders regularly to think through how we can do some good in the world. He gave us his most precious resource, his time.
I asked him why he helps so freely. He told me he thinks about death every day. When he does, he asks himself what makes a life worth living. His answer is simple. A life is measured by how much you help other people. So he tries to help as many people as he can, with everything he has. And he spends his time helping the people he is best at helping, which is entrepreneurs.
My life feels most full when I am helping someone too. So I want to give back as much as I received. But my time and energy are limited. I want to help the people I am best positioned to help. And I think the people I can help most are the ones living through the hardest moment of my own life, because I have already lived it.
My darkest moment
The hardest moment of my life was the pandemic lockdown.
In 2020 I could not go outside. I sat alone in a tiny room and wrote code until dawn. I started sleeping worse. The insomnia got worse until I went three nights in a row without sleep.
On that third night, I looked at a white sheet of paper and saw equations, or maybe computer code, written across it. Later I looked again and the paper was blank. There was nothing on it. I learned later that this is called a hallucination.
After that I went to a psychiatrist. Then came the hard part. Finding the right antidepressant for me. Finding the right therapist for me. Finding the kind of help that actually worked for me. It took more than a year. It was brutal.
The pain became a superpower
Here is the strange part. The greatest pain of my life became the superpower of my life.
I know, from the bottom of my heart, how heavy depression is. I lived it. And because I lived it, I have a motivation no one can fake. I want to help people who have been where I was.
That motivation pulled me into a PhD at MIT. The research I started in 2020, the moment I could function again, used AI to predict which adolescents might attempt suicide. My PhD thesis is about matching each person to the mental health treatment that fits them best. That idea came straight from my own year of trial and error trying to find what fit me.
I never have to manufacture motivation for this work. I know exactly why it matters, better than anyone. And when I present it, I show my motivation, which is really trying to help my past self. Maybe that is why it moves people. The results have been good. MIT communities (R2E, Sandbox, Google for Startups, and TNT) gave us more than $25K in cash and $125K in credit and a year of mentorship to turn the research into a company.
My worst pain became my superpower. Because I care about what I do.
The system cannot keep up
After the pandemic, the number of people seeking help for depression, anxiety, and severe stress climbed sharply. For young people the situation is especially serious.
This is not a feeling. It is documented. In 2021, the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, the American Academy of Pediatrics, and the Children's Hospital Association declared a national state of emergency in child and adolescent mental health. A nationally representative study published in JAMA in 2023 found that pediatric mental health emergency visits climbed from 4.8 million in 2011 to 7.5 million in 2020 [0]. Over that decade the share of pediatric ER visits driven by mental health roughly doubled, and the share tied to suicide rose five-fold. The numbers did not reset after the pandemic.
Seeing a doctor got harder, not easier. When a child in crisis needs a psychiatric bed and none is available, they wait in the emergency room. This is called boarding. Up to three out of five end up boarding, waiting in emergency departments or medical beds for a bed to open.
The reason is brutally simple. There are not enough providers. By recent estimates there are only about 8,300 child and adolescent psychiatrists practicing in the United States, against an estimated need of 30,000. Supply is not even close to demand.
If the system can't help us, can we help each other?
So here is the question I keep coming back to. If the medical system cannot reach everyone, can we reach each other?
When I think about what helped most in recovery, it was not the most intense moment of treatment. It was the long, slow climb afterward. And the single thing that helped me most during that climb was this. I stopped focusing on myself, and I helped someone else, even a little.
The worst part of my depression was the feeling that I was worthless, a failure. But being able to help the person in front of me, even slightly, was proof that I was worth something. Every time I helped someone, my own depression lifted a little more.
It turns out this is one of the most studied ideas in mental health, and it has a name.
In 1965, the social work researcher Frank Riessman described what he called the helper therapy principle [1]. He observed that when one person helps another, it is often the helper who improves the most, and that in self-help and mutual-aid groups, helping others is essential to helping yourself. This is the heart of peer recovery support. The person giving help heals.
The brain science points the same way. At UCLA, Naomi Eisenberger's lab has spent years studying what happens in the brain when we support other people. Their experiments show that being helpful activates the same reward regions that light up when people win money or eat chocolate, and that compared with acts of self-care, acts of kindness do more to reduce depression, anxiety, and loneliness [2]. Other work from the same group has found that it is specifically the act of giving support, not just receiving it, that is tied to reward-related and stress-reducing activity in the brain [3].
Read that again, because it is the whole point. Giving help does more for depression and loneliness than focusing on yourself. This is what helps most in recovery, and it is the part that medication and therapy alone often cannot reach. It is not a replacement for them. It is the piece that goes beyond medication and therapy.
That is why a mentor for mental health recovery matters so much. Not a textbook. Someone who has walked the path and is doing better now. When that person helps you, you get support. And when you are ready to help the next person, you get the deeper thing. You get to feel useful again. For recovery from mental health struggles, that feeling is what helped me the most.
What I'm doing about it: a peer support project
I can only help so many people on my own. My time and energy run out. So I want to start small and start now.
I am launching a mentoring project built on peer support in mental health recovery.
Here is my own story, plainly. I lived through depression. At the time I was certain my life was screwed and would never get better. Completely certain. I felt submerged so deep underwater that no sunlight reached me, and I had no idea which way to swim. I took medication. I went to counseling. Today I am so much better. I finished college in Korea, am doing a PhD at MIT, the school I had dreamed of, and now I run a startup. Along the way I wrote five books. One of them, "Wanna Be an Engineer," became a national bestseller in Korea and reached number two in the youth category. With the royalties I built a STEM vision scholarship foundation from zero to one.
A person who went through severe depression did all of this by turning the pain into power. You can too. If you are reading this, you have that same possibility in you.
If you think a conversation with me might help your life get a little better, send me an email at gun@wondi.ai. I will try to meet as many of you as I can.
I also need help. I cannot do this alone, so I am looking for other mentors who want to support people in recovery. If that is you, send me an email at gun@wondi.ai too. Tell me who you want to help and how, and I will try to find the right person for you.
We grow by helping each other
Life is getting lonelier. This is not just a vibe either. In 2023 the U.S. Surgeon General issued an advisory calling loneliness and isolation a public health crisis, with health risks comparable to smoking up to 15 cigarettes a day. The United Kingdom even officially appointed the world's first "Minister for Loneliness."
When the world feels this isolating, I think the best thing we can do is reach out and help each other, even a little, and grow together. That is what peer recovery support really is. Just people who have been there, turning to the next person and saying, I made it through, and I will help you find your way too.
References
[0]: Bommersbach, T. J., McKean, A. J., Olfson, M., & Rhee, T. (2023). National trends in mental health–related emergency department visits among youth, 2011–2020. JAMA.
[1]: Riessman, F. (1965). The "helper" therapy principle. Social Work.
[2]: Inagaki, T. K., & Eisenberger, N. I. (2012). Neural correlates of giving support to a loved one. Psychosomatic Medicine.
[3]: Inagaki, T. K., Bryne Haltom, K. E., Suzuki, S., Jevtic, I., Hornstein, E., Bower, J. E., & Eisenberger, N. I. (2016). The neurobiology of giving versus receiving support. Psychosomatic Medicine.