When Nora Feldpausch, MD, Founding Medical Director and current medical advisor at Mantra Health, told her father, a surgeon, that she was going into psychiatry, he promised, “You’ll treat more people in pain than a surgeon ever could.”

She has spent her career proving him right. But her impact goes far beyond psychiatry. 

In addition to being a clinician, Dr. Feldpausch is a respected clinical leader, a dairy farm owner, and a mother of four. It doesn’t matter if she’s building crisis protocols, taking one of her teenagers to get ice cream, or finding ways to keep farm employees motivated, Dr. Feldpausch puts her heart and soul into everything she does.

“If anything’s worth my blood, sweat and tears,” she says, “and I can’t do it well, I’d rather pass it along to someone who can.”

Choosing a career in psychiatry

As an undergraduate student at Cornell University, studying anthropology and American Indian studies, Dr. Feldpausch was captivated by the way individuals make sense of their lives, the stories they tell, and the ways those stories shape who people become. 

She considered alternative paths, like law school, but she loved being in the trenches, face-to-face with patients, where she felt the work was real and pressing. Her biggest concern in choosing an area of practice was that she also wanted a family and certain areas, like surgery, would make that harder.  

When she reached her psychiatry rotation in medical school, she saw an opportunity to combine her interests in the arts and science. The psychiatrists she met during her training were also some of the kindest people, deeply caring, and all shared a profound humanity for their patients. What struck her most was the time afforded to the practitioners to truly get to know the patients being treated. 

Finding her place in college mental health

Taking a rotation in the college counseling center at Michigan State University was coincidental. Dr. Feldpausch was in need of a rotation that could accommodate her personal life – she was adopting a child at the time – and needed flexibility, which Leigh White, MD, Associate Director of Counseling and Psychiatry services promised. 

She found that working with young people, many of whom were experiencing very serious disorders for the first time in their lives, like bipolar disorder and schizophrenia, was an interesting and meaningful challenge. This population had so much energy and intensity and she quickly recognized the value of quality mental health care in impacting their future success.

“The belief that ‘poor care is better than no care’ is not necessarily true,” Dr. Feldpausch says.

Working with such young people, she realized that she was training the patients how to navigate the system for the first time and helping them understand what good care really looks like. 

“Psychiatrists have the ability to define people’s truths with them,” says Dr. Feldpausch. “Asking patients to trust that you’re telling them the truth and them trusting you to guide them through the process is a privilege and a responsibility.” 

“Time is precious to me, so if I’m going to spend my time doing something, I want it to be useful,” says Dr. Feldpausch. 

A few years after residency, she took a job at Colorado State University, working with a student population of high-risk, post-hospitalization patients, as part of the counseling center’s interdisciplinary intensive treatment team. Over the next eight years there, she helped build out the school’s response to high risk care, helping to develop safety protocols that kept students in school and moving forward even after a mental health crisis., But “once something’s built and working well, I get excited about solving the next problem.” 

This led back to Michigan State University, where Dr. White was building out the counseling center’s first virtual clinic. At the time, Dr. Feldpausch was sceptical of virtual psychiatry, believing that a face-to-face meeting was critical to establishing the strong  interpersonal connection essential to high quality, effective care. What she learned as she helped create protocols and expectations for online psychiatric services was that, with the right skillset, connection can extend to virtual care and can create opportunities for students who would not otherwise have access to campus based mental healthcare. 

Building something of importance with Mantra Health

Joining a startup wasn’t on her mind, but Dr. Feldpausch says that Mantra Health was different.

“Mantra Health was building a telehealth clinic like many other companies, but they were being really diligent about making it safe and caring for people in crisis. It was clear they wanted to do it right from the beginning and were prioritizing creating a clinic that was evidence based and thoughtfully crafted,” she says, which is what compelled her to join as the company’s founding medical director in 2019. 

“The work felt important and interesting. “I look back and think, ‘Mantra was a cool experience, and I was a part of it.’” she says. “It was also one of the hardest things I’ve ever done.” 

Not only was Dr. Feldpausch building a clinic, one that would be scaled across various campuses, but she was making a very critical impact on young people and their families, their communities, and their futures. She understood that if it went well, it could be really impactful in a positive way, but if it went poorly it would be really impactful in a negative way. 

While the work and the demand on her time came with many, many challenges, Dr. Feldpausch says, “I’m really proud of what we built.” But in 2024, after close to five years in leadership, she decided to step away to once more prioritize her family, when one of her daughters was struggling with progressive hearing loss and ultimately required bilateral cochlear implants. Dr. Feldpausch explained, “I needed to allow Mantra Health to grow on its own without me, but I believe the bones are true to the mission and I still love working with them in a new context, including advising on clinical care and hosting webinars. It’s exciting to be an ongoing part of the company’s future.”

Since her leave, Mantra Health has brought in two incredible clinical leaders. Wayne Li, a former licensed family and marriage therapist and Ginger and Headspace executive, has taken on the role of VP of Care Delivery and Operations at Mantra Health, serving as the bridge between clinical quality and commercial viability. Jon Caldwell, DO, PhD, serves as the Director of Psychiatry, where he works on the clinic and operations.

Maintaining quality control 

Dr. Feldpausch’s commitment to quality does not begin and end at the clinic. It extends to the family dairy farm she helps manage with her husband, a full operation supplying to Dairy Farmers of America, which produces bottled milk, as well as cheese for places like Domino’s. There her job is less about the cows and more about the 80 people who care for them.

Dr. Feldpausch has always thought carefully about building a workplace where people feel motivated, respected, and cared for, no matter if it’s in a clinic with mental health crises or on a farm with cows. Questions she continually asks: “How do you cultivate well-being among the staff? How do you remain ethical and profitable? What are the essential pieces and what can be let go? How do you keep things centered when everything feels urgent?”

While she’s taken a step back from being a medical director, Dr. Feldpausch is keeping psychiatry in the foreground continuing to work one-on-one with patients as a part time private practitioner as well as offering consultation services across the telehealth industry. 

“I’m excited to get back to working with the patients,” says Dr. Feldpausch. “I’m also grateful I’ll be able to do the work and when I’m done have the bandwidth to shift my attention back to my family and the farm rather than being on call 24/7 to an entire staff of providers.” 

Stepping back was a hard decision, but working a 60+ hour week while being a balanced parent, she found, was not sustainable any longer. To recenter herself and her values, she needed to step away from the all-encompassing work. So she’s getting back to the basics and balancing being a mother, partner, business owner, and clinician.

For the first time in years, she admits, she’s not always tired. Will that change in a year or five when a new, exciting challenge presents itself? Knowing Dr. Feldpausch, it’s more than likely… but if there’s one thing that will always remain true: if she’s going to do it, she will commit wholeheartedly to making it the best it can be. 

“You just have to grow one tomato at a time,” she says. “But grow it well.”