ThisWayUp: The Wellness Platform Built by the Women Who Needed It

How a former Wall Street executive turned her own mental health reckoning into the free, expert-led resource she couldn’t find anywhere else.

Cat Miller had built a successful career on the kind of credentials that speak for themselves. A Harvard MBA. A long run in investment banking. A professional life that, from the outside, looked engineered for serenity.

It wasn't.

What Miller had been carrying for years had a name she eventually learned to say out loud, and a shape she finally recognized when she saw it taking up residence in her teenage daughter. She did what generations of women have done before her: go looking for the resource she wished she'd had on hand. She didn't find it. So she built it. The result is ThisWayUp.

A Wellness Platform Designed by Women for Women

ThisWayUp, the free digital platform Miller founded in 2025, is not a wellness app, not a therapy marketplace, not a brand campaign dressed up in soft fonts. It is a clinical-grade, expert-led library of video interviews, evidence-based tools, and lived-experience storytelling, designed for women and teen girls.

Miller built ThisWayUp out of her own experience of moving through early motherhood in a haze of fatigue and emotional numbness. When she was diagnosed with celiac disease in 2010, the founder felt a glimpse of hope and direction, yet her sense of discomfort remained.

The intergenerational impact of mental health struggles came into sharp focus as her daughter grew older and began to grapple with anxiety, echoing patterns Miller knew too well.

The realization was crushing—the guilt acute, the sense of responsibility suddenly impossible to ignore—but it was also a wake-up call that demanded change rather than more silence.

Her decision to confront both her own pain and her daughter’s became the turning point. With a combination of medication, consistent movement, improved gut health, time outdoors, and the steady presence of community, Miller gradually began to reclaim a sense of joy she had once assumed was gone for good.

She learned that healing was possible, but only once the suffering was named and shared. This hard-won and deeply personal understanding became the blueprint for ThisWayUp, a platform built so that other women and girls would not have to find their way out alone.

In an article in Glamour, Miller shares, “I want to foster open conversation to prevent others from experiencing similar struggles alone. By creating safe spaces for women and girls to express their mental health experiences and surrounding them with evidence-based tools and compassionate community support, we help them reclaim clarity, agency, and hope. We enable them to move forward confidently.”

Making Wellness Accessible to Those That Need It

Miller created ThisWayUp free because she believes the people who need it most are being priced out of every other option. A recent Kaiser Family Foundation analysis found that more than half of American adults who wanted mental health care in the past year didn't get it, with cost and access cited as the top reasons. Women report unmet need at significantly higher rates than men.

Additionally, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reported in 2023 that nearly three in five teen girls felt persistently sad or hopeless, the highest figure ever recorded. The number has barely moved since.

"ThisWayUp is really an important initiative. It is providing the resources, the tools, the information that women and teen girls need to be able to not only decrease ill-being like depression and anxiety but promote their own flourishing and well-being," says Applied Developmental Psychologist and Professor Dr. Kimberly Schonert-Reichl.

In a country where a single therapy session in a major city now runs $250 to $400, where insurance networks routinely list providers who aren't taking patients, and where the wellness economy has grown louder than the clinical infrastructure it claims to support, ThisWayUp is doing something radical. It is building the resource the wellness boom was supposed to build, and giving it away.

"My purpose is to ensure that women and teens do not face their well-being battles on their own. We want to provide a safe space where they can gain support and agency,” Cat Miller, founder of ThisWayUp, mentions.

The ThisWayUp Edge from Other Wellness Platforms

The clinicians who appear on ThisWayUp are not influencers in lab coats. They are working psychiatrists, psychologists, nutritionists, and practitioners who agreed to share what they know without charging the people who need to hear it. The user, whether she is a forty-five-year-old finally naming a perimenopausal collapse or a fifteen-year-old who hasn't told anyone how she actually feels, can sit with a real expert for as long as she needs to.

The lived-experience side is where the platform diverges most sharply from anything else in the space. The platform features free resources grounded in science and elevated by the storytelling of women of varied ages and backgrounds, all curated for women and girls navigating life’s everyday pressures and deeper struggles alike.

Research has consistently shown that, especially for teenage girls, story-driven content outperforms purely clinical material at the recognition stage. Hearing a real person describe the experience one has been trying to name is, for many girls and women, the first move out of the fog.

The Founder that Sees What's Needed

What is striking about Miller is that she does not talk about ThisWayUp the way founders are supposed to talk about their companies. She does not call it disruptive. She does not call it a movement. What she calls it, mostly, is what is needed.

In a season when American mental-health discourse has felt simultaneously oversaturated and underserved, ThisWayUp is doing something rare. It is treating women and teen girls as the people who deserve the resource, not the demographic to be sold to. It is taking what could have been a private answer to a private grief and offering it as a public good.

It is, as the platform's name suggests, pointing somewhere.