Katherine Ponte
Lawyer · Professor · Entrepreneur · Author · Advocate
Katherine Ponte is a Canadian professor, entrepreneur, lawyer, author, mental-health advocate and nonprofit founder. She founded ForLikeMinds, a peer-support community focused on mental-illness recovery, and is an Assistant Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at Yale School of Medicine. [1][2][3][4]
Last updated
Career and work
Ponte earned a law degree from Osgoode Hall Law School in 1994 and worked as a lawyer for approximately five years, including legal work in Canada and Brazil. She later earned an MBA from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania in 2001 and subsequently worked in business, finance and entrepreneurship. [14][1]
Beginning in 2018, Ponte shifted much of her work toward mental-health recovery and peer support. She founded ForLikeMinds, an online peer-support community that has grown to more than 150,000 people, and built a group of recovery-focused initiatives around it, including BipolarThriving and Psych Ward Greeting Cards. [4][6]
Ponte joined the Yale School of Medicine faculty in 2021 and is now an Assistant Clinical Professor of Psychiatry. She is the author of ForLikeMinds and Your Mental Health Recovery Workbook and co-authored Loving Someone with a Serious Mental Illness with Izzy Goncalves, published by New Harbinger in 2025. Her first-person writing has also appeared in NAMI, Psychology Today, Psychiatric Services and Schizophrenia Bulletin. [1][4][17]
What has been publicly discussed
“Because hope can conquer stigma. Recovery is real.”
— Katherine Ponte [16]
