Selena Gomez and her mom, Mandy Teefey, want you to work on your mental fitness—and their company Wondermind can help
Mother-and-daughter duo Mandy Teefey and Selena Gomez started Wondermind to be a ‘mental fitness ecosystem’ aimed at tackling the mental health epidemic by making resources more accessible.
BY KC Ifeanyi
When Mandy Teefey launched her company Wondermind two years ago, her cofounder, who’s also her daughter, had bold ambitions.
“She had always wanted a Planned Parenthood for mental health,” recalls Teefey, Wondermind’s CEO. It’s a lofty goal, she readily admits. But when that cofounder is Selena Gomez, it may not be so unattainable.
Wondermind is described as a “mental fitness ecosystem” comprised of expert-backed content including podcasts, a newsletter, worksheets, articles, and more. It’s designed to help users better understand mental health as a whole, and, more specifically, where they may be in their own particular journeys—even if they’re not sure where to start.
For example, clicking on the prompt “filter by feels” on Wondermind’s homepage takes you to a list of emotions—insecure, happy, stuck, lonely, anxious, etc.—which leads you to a deeper dive into resources. The Wondermind team is also developing an app aimed at making the concept of mental fitness—i.e. working on your mental health regularly—more accessible, through daily greetings and prompts that may encourage the user to engage in activities such as journaling.
“We are really setting up what our company is by what the consumer needs, instead of us giving them what we think they need,” Teefey says. “This is something personal to us. So we grow with them, we don’t grow at them.”
“My belief and everything that I’ve been to the world has been about vulnerability, about honesty, and not being afraid of what you’re feeling,” adds Gomez, the chief impact officer of Wondermind. “So this, to me, is another layer of me wanting to explore that more as well.”
In many ways, Wondermind is an extension of Teefey and Gomez’s own journeys navigating mental health. Teefey was misdiagnosed as bipolar for 20 years before discovering she actually has ADHD. And in 2020, Gomez, who in years prior had spoken candidly about her own depression and anxiety, revealed she herself had been diagnosed as bipolar. She shed even more light on her condition in her 2022 Apple TV+ documentary My Mind & Me, and advocating for mental health is one of the core pillars of her wildly successful makeup brand, Rare Beauty.
“I want people to know about [mental health] in an easy way, and I also want people to not be afraid of it,” Gomez says. “Once I realized what was happening inside, it really allowed me to be free in a way. So I just want that for everyone.”
Last year, U.S. Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy issued an advisory detailing a public health crisis of loneliness, isolation, and lack of connection, which is linked to not only depression, anxiety, and suicide, but also cardiovascular disease, dementia, and premature death. Despite a mental health emergency that was turbocharged by the pandemic, many people still aren’t getting the help they need.
According to Mental Health America, more than 50 million adults in the U.S. have some kind of mental illness, but 55% don’t receive treatment. Nearly 60% of youths with major depression also don’t receive any treatment either. Issues such as the cost of therapy and lack of time or insurance certainly factor in here. Teefey’s hope for Wondermind is to be an additive part of mental health resources, specifically in making support more accessible.
“No one company is going to have the solution,” Teefey says. “We hope to spearhead a community and a society that is going to embrace what it means to democratize [mental health resources].”
Gomez sees Wondermind as an extension of the work she’s done in advocating for better mental health for everyone.
“My goal has always been to understand it myself first and to let people know I’m not some sort of person [who] just has gone through it and I’m okay,” says Gomez. “It’s a day-to-day process for me. The most important thing for me is to know, if I were to be gone tomorrow, I put my heart behind people and their well-being. That’s all I would love to be remembered for.”
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