“Action is my coping mechanism,” says Wendy Marie Ingram, Ph.D. ’15, accepting an award in Japan for her global advocacy in mental health. The UC Berkeley alum and founder of Dragonfly Mental Health has built a movement rooted in both science and lived experience, helping thousands of academics worldwide confront mental illness, prevent loss, and strengthen community care. What began in the wake of tragedy at Berkeley has become a model for institutional compassion: evidence-based training, peer connection, and cultural change that aims to prevent crisis.
When Wendy Marie Ingram, Ph.D. ’15, stepped to a podium in Japan to accept a public service and advocacy honor, she opened with a line that has become a compass for her work: “action is my coping mechanism.” It was not an applause line. It is a principle. The losses she witnessed in graduate school were not abstractions. They were classmates, mentors, trainees. The recognition she was receiving, she said, “was not for me. It was for the… all the people we’re doing it for, and because of.” The moment gave her “a lot of energy to keep going.”
This conversation traces how that conviction took root at UC Berkeley, grew through grief and organizing, and matured into a model that makes care a shared practice rather than a private burden.
A purpose shaped by loss
Ingram describes those years at Berkeley with clarity. She recalls the size of the Molecular and Cell Biology program. Her cohort had fifty-six students. The cohort below had twenty-nine. In one academic year, that community lost a classmate named Paul. In that same year, they also lost a faculty member, a postdoc, and an undergraduate to suicide. The pattern sharpened her sense of responsibility. What she felt first was urgency. Do something for those you can help.
Her language refuses euphemism. She names mental illness and suicide in academia. She names the people who do the research and the teaching as people whose lives matter. “Their lives mean something,” she says. The work to improve mental health among academics worldwide “is worth something to more than just… me, or the people who are the loss survivors. It’s bigger than that.”