Katherine Ponte, JD, MBA

Katherine Ponte, BA, JD, MBA, CPRP is a mental health advocate, author, non-profit leader, entrepreneur, coach, lawyer and lecturer in psychiatry. At Yale, she is currently contributing to research on how the financial services and retail industries could better serve low income people, particularly people with mental illness. She has a BA from Western University and JD from Osgoode Hall Law School of York University, leading Canadian universities and an MBA from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. She is the child of immigrants, a citizen of Canada, Portugal and the U.S. and a first-generation high school graduate, who grew up in one of the poorest neighborhoods in Canada where she was a leading education advocate. Katherine has been living with severe bipolar I disorder with psychosis and extended periods of suicidal depression for over twenty-five years. Since reaching recovery in 2018, Katherine has committed herself to helping people affected by mental illness reach recovery through various initiatives. Katherine founded ForLikeMinds, an online peer support community for people living with or supporting someone with mental illness, and built a platform of recovery-focused mental health initiatives around it. She actively leads an online mental health community of over 150,000 people on the ForLikeMinds platform. She created Psych Ward Greeting Cards, a 501(c)(3) non-profit that is a leading psychiatric hospital outreach program. The program distributes donated greeting cards with recovery messages, chocolate and small gifts from across the U.S. and abroad to psychiatric unit patients at major hospitals to inspire hope for recovery. It has reached over 15,000 patients. The program partners with Gracie Square Hospital, Lenox Hill Hospital, NewYork-Presbyterian Payne Whitney Clinic, NewYork-Presbyterian Westchester Behavioral Health Center, and NYC Health + Hospitals/Bellevue in the New York City area and Connecticut Valley Hospital and Yale New Haven Psychiatric Hospital in Connecticut. Katherine also created BipolarThriving, which provides one-on-one Bipolar Recovery Coaching to people with bipolar and their supporters. Katherine is the author of ForLikeMinds: Mental Illness Recovery Insights;, cited as a "book of note" in You Are Not Alone: The NAMI Guide to Navigating Mental Healthy; Your Mental Health Recovery Workbook: A Workbook to Share Hope (Trigger Publishing) reviewed in Psychiatric Times; and Cuaderno para recuperar tu salud mental: Una ayuda indispensable para tener una vida estable y significativa (Ediciones Urano) and co-author of Loving Someone with a Serious Mental Illness: Caring for Your Loved One and Yourself on the Journey to Mental Health Recovery (New Harbinger Publications), and was the leading contributor to the National Alliance on Mental Illness Blog for many years and is a contributor to Psychology Today Blog. Her personal accounts have been published in peer-reviewed journals such as Psychiatric Services and Schizophrenia Bulletin. Her writings have been highly praised by the leading mental health recovery scholar, Larry Davidson, her mentor. The leading stigma scholar, Patrick Corrigan has called her a "thought leader." She has been a speaker at the NewYork-Presbyterian Westchester Behavioral Health Center Psychosocial Rehabilitation Department Grand Rounds and at various industry conferences and seminars. She is also a Certified Psychiatric Rehabilitation Practitioner and New York Certified Peer Specialist-Provisional. Katherine is a member of the Board of the National Alliance on Mental Illness-New York City and a member of Fountain House. She is the recipient of the highest honor in the bipolar disorder community, the Mogens Schou Award from the International Society for Bipolar Disorders. Katherine is committed to increasing mental health awareness, especially for people living with serious mental illness, through these efforts and by sharing her story publicly. Her Recovery Journey and Talking About Mental Illness videos have been viewed over one million times and writings have been viewed over 850,000 times. She has also been interviewed by major news outlets, including CBS, CNN, INSIDER, and WebMD on topics related to mental health. Katherine's life mission is to inspire others to believe that mental illness recovery is possible and to help them reach it.