Ben's Mental Health Story

Ever since I was a kid, I’ve always loved puzzles. In elementary school, I devoured books filled with brain teasers and trivia. As I got older, I gravitated towards young adult books focused on mystery, with main characters who solved puzzles or navigated wordplay to save the day (I still go back and read The Mysterious Benedict Society and The Phantom Tollbooth every few years). As an adult, I start every day with the New York Times crossword. 

I think my love of puzzles is what drew me to science, and more particularly, psychiatry and neuroscience. I started college studying chemistry, with the organic compounds acting almost like real life puzzle pieces in chemical equations. But I found something missing in the impact of those molecules, until my neurobiology class. I delved into classes on psychopharmacology, learning and memory, and more, fascinated by the questions posed by the human brain.

At the same time, I started to step back and consider the puzzle that was my own brain and mental health. I had begun to experience more and more complicated, looping thoughts, a brain that felt like a constantly revving engine, and random fluctuations in motivation and energy. It was impacting my day to day life, and I couldn’t figure out what was behind it all. 

On the one hand, there’s genetics. As an identical twin, I thought a lot about genetics and epigenetics, what nature hands us, and how that is actually realized in the body. In my time in the diagnostics space, I got very familiar with genetics, and I’ve found that in psychiatry, that puzzle piece is still incomplete. Then, on the other hand, there’s environment – how I was raised, the pressures and motivations around me in school and at home. And I know that’s a large contributor, but the connections are messy.

I’ve been able to make a lot of progress through treatment and therapy, but as a puzzler, I feel like there’s a bigger picture that I’m still missing. I’m convinced that there’s a way to put the pieces together, but we just don’t have the right ones available. I think with the right dataset and the right clues, we can unlock mental health and make better diagnoses and better treatment decisions. And it’s not just medical treatment – it’s better lifestyle choices and routines that unlock my best self. 

And that’s what drew me to Headlamp. We’re on a mission to bring the data together and enable more precision in psychiatry. Right now, each person’s puzzle is treated the same, as showing the same picture of “depression” or “anxiety,” but we know there’s more to it than that. I look forward to the day when each person has the pieces at hand to solve their puzzle, and build their better self. 

Ben Rudeen is the Operations Lead at Headlamp Health. Before Headlamp, Ben worked at Tempus AI, where he focused on operations and strategy for both their oncology and psychiatry business units. He’s passionate about bringing innovative research and technologies to patient care and unraveling the mysteries of the brain.