Zak Williams, Robin Williams’ Son, Wants Us To Better Understand The New 988 Suicide Hotline

Eight years after he lost his beloved father Robin Williams to suicide, Zak Williams is more committed than ever to removing the stigma around mental health and helping people support their mental and overall wellbeing.

His passion has led him to embrace advocacy work and community service, as well as launch startup PYM, which he describes as a mental hygiene company whose ethos and products are rooted in support mechanisms he discovered when he was dealing with his own heightened depression and anxiety after his father’s passing.

“I never set out to be an advocate, but it just so happened I found that service was very healing for my trauma,” he says.

“Through my healing journey, I discovered that learning about the systems and interventions relating to mental health support became part of a deeper mission around finding ways to better be of service to causes relating to mental health. The way in which I celebrate my dad’s legacy is trying to be a good dad, trying to be kind and considerate when and where possible, and figuring out opportunities to best be of service.”

When policymakers were creating the new 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline, Williams worked with experts to understand the various updates they were including in the rollout. Now, to help demystify what happens when someone dials those three digits, he teamed with podcast network Lemonada Media as a special correspondent on four-part series Call For Help, which debuts August 16. Each episode, Williams and Lemonada co-founder and host Stephanie Wittels Wachs delve into the context around the hotline, and provide information about what callers can expect.

“The short answer is that you’re going to receive a compassionate response,” he says. A more nuanced response, too. “If you’re a veteran and you’re in crisis and seeking support, the goal would be to connect you to someone with experience. That has so much more impact, according to the data, versus connecting with someone without similar context who wouldn’t be able to connect on a personal level, in a more empathetic way.”

But US has a long way to go to mend its mental health system, Williams says. Through his advocacy work, including as a US trustee of the international advocacy organization United for Global Mental Health, he’s learned about some of the systems needed to address mental health, and the price tag that’s associated with them.

“We’re still under-resourced in terms of the allocation from the public sector but also just in general in terms of the mental health-oriented medical GDP spend compared to the total medical GDP spend,” he says of the US. “If we’re looking at the mental health GDP spend relative to the medical GDP spend, right now it’s about 2.5%. It’s getting better, but we need to be over 10%, and there are some models that say we need to be in the 15%-17% range to be really effective. So there’s a long way to go to increase mental health focused spend for individuals.”

In tandem with public support, Williams is placing a lot of hope in recent inroads around wellness—artificial intelligence and machine learning, and new paradigms in coaching, community care and psychedelic care—many of which were accelerated during the pandemic.

“I’m big proponent of integrated psychedelic care, which means working with a trained psychiatrist around guided support. There are incredible opportunities around addiction, trauma, depression. What catalyzed during the covid pandemic was a reprioritization of mental health care, and what we’re seeing in terms of the organizations I’m working with is this is a new normal and we need to allocate resources effectively to manage the mental health care of our populations in this new normal environment. That requires going beyond just thinking about it as triage,” he says.

“Whether it comes to someone who is in a substance abuse situation or a mental health breakdown, to deal with situations where it’s crisis-oriented care is resource intensive. So how can we provide solutions earlier on? Things like lifestyle interventions around nutrition, fitness, mindfulness, meditation, breath work, community support and self-improvement, so you’re not in a situation when you’re having to deal with someone at a low point, in crisis.”

Enter PYPY
M, which Williams launched in 2020 and whose name is both an acronym for the tagline Prepare Your Mind and a personal reference. “It’s not coincidentally my middle name, and it’s an homage to my dad. He gave the name to me because he said it sounded vaguely Welsh,” Williams says.

“I created the company because I was having a really tough time after my dad died by suicide and found myself diagnosed with PTSD, depression and anxiety. I was self-medicating with alcohol and just not having a really good time of it. I realized that I could start healing through the trauma by committing to service, but for depression and anxiety I realized my hormones were actually imbalanced. I learned later that my neurotransmitter environment was out of wack—meaning serotonin, dopamine, epinephrine…”

PYM is steeped in prioritizing mental health as an everyday solution, and in the belief that everyone can be the best version of themselves by establishing daily rituals that support their mind and overall wellbeing.

“What we don’t talk about often enough is daily mental health support. Mental health is a spectrum. It just so happens to be classified in many situations as a crisis situation,” Williams says. “If we take it upon ourselves as a society to think about what we can do for ourselves every day—it can be 10 minutes long, it doesn’t have to be some comprehensive ritual—we can start prioritizing the spectrum of needs that comes from having a bad day to having anxiety attacks to feeling depressed to having a chronic condition.”

The company’s first product, the Mood Chew, contains L-theanine, an amino acid found in some teas that helps support people’s Gamma-aminobutyric acid (GABA) environment and is an ingredient Williams found transformational in balancing his own hormones. New products are on the way, including an “all in one neurotransmitter nutrition product which is launching early next year. And we’re looking at the technology component. How can people track their mental hygiene through tools and better improve it,” Williams says.

“Where we’re going is creating a mental hygiene system, focused on comprehensive neurotransmitter support and balance but also looking at what else is going on in your life and figuring out how you can best support yourself. It’s not just about supplements. It’s about looking at the entire scope of someone’s life and how they’re taking care of themselves. Meditation, mindfulness, breath work, community support and self-involvement.”

Williams’ own mental health hygiene regimen includes nutrition, fitness, meditation and spending time in nature. “But the thing that’s been the most profound for me is a mindfulness exercises and it involves a daily gratitude ritual,” he says. “When I get frustrated and blinded by things like resentment, it takes me off track and the ritual of having that daily gratitude exercise has been profoundly transformational.”

And he’s learning to embrace self-love. “I started realizing over time, and it was hard for me to articulate initially, is that it’s not selfish to love yourself and prioritize your needs. It actually enables you to better be of service, to show up for others. We need to take opportunities to love ourselves more.”