Can you believe what’s happening to our kids right now? The mental health crisis has become the quiet epidemic of our time. For those of us working with children and teens, it feels like we’re trying to catch a waterfall with a bucket — too many needs, too few hands. We wait until there’s a crisis before acting, because that’s what the system has trained us to do.
In 2020, I lost my first patient to suicide.
Her name was Josephine Kaia Mullins.
She’d been stable. Doing well. We had her on a three-month follow-up plan, and the medication she was taking at this point was for maintenance. Then COVID hit, and like for so many, the world collapsed inward. Isolation, fear, no structure, no touch. The support systems fell away. One day, I got the message — she’d taken her life. What hit me the hardest the irony of the whole situation. She died using the same medication that had once kept her stable and functioning well.
That moment split me open. As a prescriber, I thought about quitting, but that felt like a cowardice decision. I live with the quiet fear: Did I help? Did I make things worse? I will never stop asking that question. But losing Kaia forced me to ask a bigger one — how do we stop waiting for kids to break before we help them heal?
A year later, I was at a routine dinner with my best friend, of the past 25 yrs and as usual we began discussing the state of humanity and different ideas about how we were going to save the world... but that night it stopped being a joke.
We found ourselves talking not only about the mental health crisis in kids, but about something else we couldn’t ignore — families arriving in the U.S. with nothing but trauma, hope, and a suitcase. Families that looked a lot like ours growing up. First-generation kids, just like we were, trying to rebuild a life in a place where they didn’t know the rules, the language, or the path ahead.
The resilience it takes to start over like that is unbelievable. And we wondered… what if we could help kids start building that kind of strength? What if creativity — through art, humor, and real human connection — Could we give kids a completely different way to build the resilience they need before adolescence knocks them off their feet?
That’s how kAiA was born. Named for the girl who changed everything.
kAiA will become a space where creativity heals, where kids use their gifts — comedy, painting, performing — not just to express themselves but to serve others. They raise money for nonprofits, tell stories that make people laugh again, paint hope where there was pain.
And somewhere in that process, the adults heal too. Building Kaia gave me purpose again — a reason to get up, a way to turn loss into light.
So when you join Kaia — whether you’re a child, a parent, a volunteer, or a partner — I hope it feeds your soul. Because yes, our days are full of heartbreak and hard stories. But this? This is where we get to write a different one.