Carmine Di Maro reads hundreds of mental health startup pitches a year. He has watched 51 companies go through the One Mind Accelerator, raise $1.45 billion between them, and in some cases shut down. He also spent his first job out of college mired in addiction, reading every self-help book he could find, convinced that needing help was a personal failing.

Both of those things are load-bearing in this conversation. Patrick and Carmine met in 2023, when Somethings was one of eleven companies in the accelerator's first cohort. Three years later they sit down as two people with lived experience of the thing they're both trying to fix, and the conversation moves fast between the systems level and the personal one.

They get into why a decade of paid-for therapy hasn't moved outcomes, why a free 100-year-old program with no leadership still runs 2,000 meetings a week in Los Angeles, what a survey found about the one workplace benefit that actually improves mental wellness, and why neither of them thinks the health care system should be responsible for making sure you have friends.

In this episode:

• The survey question about confidants where the average answer came back zero

• Why Carmine argues screen use meets the clinical criteria for addiction

• What peer support does that therapy structurally cannot

• The workplace benefit that outperformed every wellness perk in the study

• How Covid lowered the barrier to a first 12-step meeting

• Why adding psychiatric beds makes the bed problem worse

• What Carmine would change about mental health if he had one wish

Applications for the fifth One Mind Accelerator cohort are open through mid-October. Subscribe to Self Disclosed on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts.

Chapters:

00:00 Ten years of paying for therapy, no change

01:58 The average answer was zero

06:22 It meets the definition of addiction

09:25 The iPad at the dinner table

12:36 2,000 meetings a week, nobody in charge

15:01 Why the ER became a food bank

23:49 What it took to ask for help

34:12 A brain textbook with no psychiatry in it

37:35 The only perk that worked

55:41 Cohort five, and the EpiPen for addiction