Early on, it was clear that Sangu Delle (MBA/JD 2016) was driven to excel. As a six-year-old living in Ghana Delle wrote to Harvard University President Neil Rudenstine to ask when he could enroll. Rudenstine wrote back: Delle would have to wait a few years to apply. He did, receiving his undergraduate degree in 2010 and founding the College-Bound Mentoring Program with his roommate while both were still students. Delle continued to rack up achievements before and after HBS, until a business deal he was working on went south—and he fell into a deep depression. “I had never dealt with failure and failure of that magnitude,” he told Harvard’s Alumni website. “I didn’t know how to talk about it. I had never had that conversation before. It was isolating. I was deeply depressed. I would have anxiety attacks. But on the outside, everything was amazing. On the outside, I kept racking up awards. And it hit me. …I realized how dangerous the stigma of mental health troubles was.”

Delle’s response was a 2017 TED talk, “There’s No Shame in Taking Care of Your Mental Health.” He has also founded Harvard Alumni for Mental Health. Noting that he gave his TED talk from the perspective of an African Black man, Delle says he’s since been contacted by people from Idaho to Sudan. “There’s a universality of the experience, which has been deeply moving,” says Delle, who now serves as CEO of Africa Health Holdings and chairman of Golden Palm Investments. “There’s a lot more that unites us than divides us.”

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