JUST OVER A YEAR AGO, Daniella Pierson took a deep breath and clicked on a Zoom link. The 25-year-old still couldn’t quite believe who she was about to interview—much less on something as intimate as mental health. But when the other windows popped up on her screen, she relaxed. There was Mandy Teefey, the producer known for the Netflix show 13 Reasons Why, wearing sweats in her bedroom. And then there was Teefey’s daughter, Selena Gomez, cozied up on her couch in a snuggly blanket.
The interview—for The Newsette, a trendy Gen Z newsletter Pierson started five years earlier in college—had been made possible by a series of fortuitous connections. And maybe because it was explicitly planned to discuss mental health, the conversation got deep fast. Teefey opened up about her ADHD and anxiety. Gomez remembered how the press jumped on her when she started speaking out about self-doubt and self-esteem: “I got so angry that my story was twisted.” Pierson was compelled to share that she suffered from OCD, something she’d never admitted publicly—in part because of stigma in the Hispanic community she came from. There was some kind of magic between the three women. Looking back, Gomez says, “It’s one of the moments I felt closest to my mom—us coming together to talk about something we each have experienced in our own manner. It was wonderful. And then to be understood by Daniella was even better.” None of them wanted the conversation to end, so they decided… it wouldn’t.
Early next year, Pierson, Teefey, and Gomez will launch WonderMind, a media company focusing on mental health in a way that has never been done before. In a heated mental health startup market, crowded with wellness apps and therapy platforms, WonderMind is going after a more deeply rooted, society-wide obstacle: stigma. The founders’ goal is nothing short of normalizing mental health and making it cool to talk about. “We wanted to create something outside the box
