The former Super Bowl champion wants to help make mental health more accessible to black millennials
In 2016, The former Super Bowl Ryan Mundy was seating in a room full of venture capitalists presenting startup proposals when a thought popped into his mind. None of the ideas he had heard aimed at solving the biggest problems of his own life.
Mundy, The former Super Bowl a 2009 Super Bowl winner with the Pittsburgh Steelers, struggled to find goals after leaving the NFL in 2015.
He was thinking about mental health – and he was almost sure that the same was true of other young black Americans. “I feel very concerned that I know how to take care of my shoulders and knees. But when it comes to supporting emotional and mental health, I have had a challenging experience,” Mundy told News Make it.
The 37-year-old says mental health can be a struggle in the black American community. Awareness is often low and access to care even lower. For example, in 2019, only 9.8% of black Americans reported receiving mental health care, compared with 19.8% of non-Hispanic white Americans, dueto the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.
In the end, Mundy decided to do something. So in October 2020, he founded the Chicago-based startup Alkeme Health. A mental health platform explicitly designed to meet the needs of the black community. Alkeme, pronounced “Alchemy,” has amassed about 30,000 users, 300 expert articles, and $5 million in funding.
It’s a good start, but Mundy says his company’s struggles are just getting started: “30,000 users” is nothing compared to the roughly 11 million black millennials in the country Alceme is trying to reach.
“Stigma is a barrier for everyone.”
A new man at the University of Michigan, Mundy said he watched other aspiring student-athletes struggle to fit in and return home before the academic calendar began. Then, in 2008, during his new season with the Steelers, Mundy said the standard dressing room response to mental health treatment was, “What was that? How did you do it? Take that from me.”