In 2016, Ryan Mundy was sitting in a room full of venture capitalists fielding start-up pitches when a thought occurred to him: None of the ideas he’d heard were geared toward solving the biggest issues in his own life. Mundy, a Super Bowl champion in 2009 with the Pittsburgh Steelers, was struggling to find a purpose after leaving the NFL in 2015. He suffered from anxiety, stemming from multiple relatives being sequentially diagnosed with type 2 diabetes, Alzheimer’s disease and cardiovascular disease. Mental health was on his mind — and he was pretty sure that was true for other young Black Americans, too. “I found it very troubling that I knew how to take care of my shoulder and knee, but when it came to emotional and mental health support, I was having a really rough go at it,” Mundy tells CNBC Make It. The 37-year-old says mental health in America’s Black communities can be a struggle: Awareness is often low, and access to care is even lower. In 2019, only 9.8% of Black Americans reported receiving mental health treatment, compared with 19.8% of non-Hispanic white Americans, according to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Eventually, Mundy decided to do something about it. In October 2020, he launched Chicago-based start-up Alkeme Health, a mental health platform specifically designed to meet the needs of Black communities. Alkeme — pronounced like “Alchemy” — has already amassed roughly 30,000 users, approximately 300 contributing experts and $5 million in funding, he says. That’s a good start, but Mundy says his company’s fight is just beginning: “30,000 users” pales in comparison to the country’s roughly 11 million Black millennials Alkeme wants to reach.
‘Stigma is a barrier for everyone’
As a freshman at the University of Michigan, Mundy says he watched other aspiring student-athletes struggle to acclimate, ultimately going home before the academic calendar even started. In 2008, during his rookie season with the Steelers, Mundy says the locker room’s standard response to mental health treatment was, “What is that? How do you do that? Get that away from me.”
During his eight seasons in the NFL, Mundy played for the Pittsburgh Steelers, New York Giants and Chicago Bears. Grant Halverson | Getty Images Sport | Getty Images
Today, plenty of professional sports teams have in-house sports psychologists, and high-profile athletes like Michael Phelps and Simone Biles have spoken up about the stigmas surrounding mental health. But when Covid hit, Mundy says, the teletherapy industry gravitated largely toward women, senior citizens and members of the LGBTQ community. Black Americans, he says, were mostly left out. Mundy saw an opportunity. Since leaving the NFL, he’d built a hefty business network — getting an MBA from the University of Miami, launching and selling a reusable straw company, and becoming the managing director of an asset management company. Those connections helped him fund Alkeme relatively quickly, he says. The bigger challenge, he notes, was figuring out how to build a platform for a community that wasn’t the most aware — or accepting — of mental health care. Leading with “go try therapy” might not always be well-received. Instead, Alkeme’s website and app provide three types of health education content: live expert panels, meditative audio clips and skill-building masterclasses. The masterclasses include lectures on combatting issues often specific to Black Americans, like microaggressions, racism and generational trauma. “It was something I pontificated on quite a bit, because when we talk about mental health, the automatic answer is to go see a therapist,” Mundy says. “I wanted to take a different approach, because stigma is a barrier for everyone.”
An uphill battle for Black wellness