Katherine Ponte, JD, MBA

Katherine Ponte is an award-winning mental health advocate, best-selling author, nonprofit leader, and an Assistant Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at the Yale School of Medicine. She is the child of Azorean-Portuguese immigrants 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. This early community advocacy experience was formative to her ultimate mental health focused mission.

Katherine has been living with severe bipolar I disorder with psychosis and extended periods of suicidal depression for over 25 years. She also lives with Tardive dyskinesia (TD). Since reaching recovery in 2018, Katherine has committed herself to helping other people affected by mental illness reach recovery through various initiatives, which include sharing her lived experience and peer support.

At Yale, Katherine is a member of the recovery finance team. She is currently contributing to research on how the financial services and retail industries could better serve low income people, particularly those with mental illness.

Katherine also shares her real-life insights through her extensive writing and recovery-oriented coaching and mainstream community engagement.

She 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 Health; 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). Most recently, she co-authored Loving Someone with a Serious Mental Illness: Caring for Your Loved One and Yourself on the Journey to Mental Health Recovery (New Harbinger Publications). Katherine 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.

Katherine’s writings have been highly praised by the leading mental health recovery scholar, Larry Davidson. 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. 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.

Peer support inspired Katherine’s own recovery, following her third involuntary hospitalization. Katherine has applied the principles of peer support to all her work. She 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 also created BipolarThriving, which provides one-on-one Bipolar Recovery Coaching to people with bipolar and their supporters.

Katherine created Psych Ward Greeting Cards, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit that is a leading psychiatric hospital outreach program. The program distributes donated greeting cards with recovery messages and chocolate to psychiatric unit patients at major hospitals to inspire hope for recovery. The program has reached over 25,000 patients since it was founded in 2019 in partnership 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 and Hackensack Meridian Health in New Jersey.

Katherine has committed herself to both informal and formal advocacy to counter stigma, increase awareness, and promote initiatives to improve outcomes for people affected by mental illness. 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 and the National Alliance on Mental Illness-New York City's Ending the Silence Award.

Katherine 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 also a Certified Psychiatric Rehabilitation Practitioner and New York Certified Peer Specialist-Provisional.