Speaker's Profile

Patrick Gilligan is the Founder and CEO of Somethings, a youth mental health app, bringing a deeply personal and mission-driven perspective to building more accessible mental health support for young people. His work is rooted in his own lived experience navigating mental health challenges and recovering from an eating disorder as a teen, where peer support played a critical role in his healing. That experience, along with the loss of a friend to suicide during college, shaped his commitment to ensuring that other young people have access to timely, relatable, and effective support systems.With a background in product design from Stanford, Patrick approaches mental health through a design and user-experience lens, focusing on how support is accessed, experienced, and integrated into the daily lives of youth. He founded the company to build the kind of solution he wished existed growing up, emphasizing peer support as a powerful and scalable complement to traditional care models. His leadership prioritizes creating services that feel approachable, human-centered, and stigma-free, particularly for teens who may not otherwise engage with the mental health system.Patrick’s vision is to reach at least one million youth and meaningfully reduce youth suicide by expanding access to both peer and professional support. He is focused on building a model that can scale responsibly, partner with schools and communities, and strengthen the broader mental health ecosystem, ensuring more young people are supported before reaching a point of crisis.

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