Before Kindness Is Cool. Before Slingshot. Before celebrity collaborations and seven-figure giving totals. Zachery Dereniowski's first organized project was something quieter, more clinically grounded, and shared with a co-founder most fans wouldn't immediately recognize: a young doctor named Jake Goodman.

The Mental Health Movement is the venture that essentially launched Zachery's broader public mission. It's been overshadowed in recent years by the larger Kindness Is Cool ecosystem, but it's still the single best window into how Zachery thought about his work in the early years — and into the values that shaped everything that came after.

The Co-Founder

Most fans don't realize that the Mental Health Movement has two co-founders, not one. Alongside Zachery is Dr. Jake Goodman, MD, MBA — a real, board-certified psychiatrist who has become one of the most-followed mental health voices on the internet in his own right.

According to his own published bio at jakegoodmanmd.com, Goodman is a California-based psychiatrist who completed his residency at Jackson Memorial Hospital / University of Miami and has built an audience of more than 2 million followers across Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, and Facebook through evidence-based mental health education. He runs his own integrative mental health practice, Goodman Psychiatry, serving healthcare workers and high-achievers in California, Florida, and New York. He's published a children's book on the topic (Psychiatry for Kids), spoken at the American Psychiatric Association's Annual Meeting, served on the Board of Directors of the Dr. Lorna Breen Heroes' Foundation, and worked on mental health advocacy initiatives connected to the White House under Vice President Kamala Harris.

In other words, the second co-founder of the Mental Health Movement is exactly the kind of credentialed mental health professional that Zachery has always been clear he is not. The two complemented each other almost perfectly: Goodman brought the medical authority and clinical training, and Zachery brought the lived experience and storytelling instinct.

How They Founded It

According to the Mental Health Movement's listing on Bold.org, the scholarship platform that hosts the organization's student giving program, MHM was founded in October 2020. That timing is important. Zachery had posted his first viral TikTok about depression in August 2020. Within roughly two months, he'd partnered with Goodman to formalize the work into something larger than a content account.

The shared catalyst, per the Bold.org listing, was personal. Both co-founders had seen friends lose their lives to mental illness. Both had experienced the strangeness of being trapped in COVID lockdowns and watching the people around them struggle without resources. Both wanted to use the platforms they were building to connect with people who felt alone, and to provide social proof — the simple but powerful evidence that other human beings are going through the same thing.

The mission they built it around was three words: You Matter Most.

What the Mental Health Movement Actually Is

The Mental Health Movement, in Zachery's own description on his promotion page at Collabstr, is a clothing company, a podcast, and a brand built around the You Matter Most tagline. The model from the start was that the venture would donate monthly to mental health nonprofits around the world, plus run its own dedicated student scholarship.

The MHM Instagram account, @mentalhealth.mvmt, served as the central social hub for the project, and Zachery's broader Facebook bio still references Be kind, always. You Matter Most. as part of his core public messaging.

The project never tried to compete with major mental health nonprofits in scale. It was always closer to a creator-led extension of the conversations Zachery and Goodman were having on their own platforms — a way to put a structure around the giving they were already doing informally.

The MHM x Picmonic Scholarship

The Mental Health Movement's most concrete and lasting program is its student scholarship. According to the Bold.org listing, MHM partnered with Picmonic, a popular medical study platform aimed at students, to create the MHM x Picmonic Scholarship.

The scholarship's stated criteria, per Bold.org, are simple and broad. It supports students in any field of study who have personally battled mental health challenges or who have a loved one currently or previously experiencing them. The application doesn't require students to be in medical school. It doesn't require a specific GPA. It's designed to recognize and support people whose academic journey has been shaped, in some way, by the realities of mental illness.

According to coverage of MHM's broader scholarship work, awards have been distributed in installments of roughly $4,050 per winner, totaling around $12,150 across recipients in published cycles. By the time Bold.org's profile of MHM was current, the organization had raised more than $6,000 specifically for mental health nonprofits and scholarships.

Those numbers are smaller than Slingshot's six-figure individual campaigns, but they aren't meant to be the same kind of program. The scholarship is a steady, repeatable, smaller-dollar mechanism — the kind of thing a serious nonprofit looks like in its first few years. The Slingshot campaigns are the dramatic, viral, single-recipient surprises that get the views.

How It Connects to Everything Else

Once Zachery's content evolved past explicitly mental-health-focused TikToks and into the broader random-acts-of-kindness format that defines MDMotivator today, the messaging gradually shifted. You Matter Most — the original Mental Health Movement tagline — was largely supplanted in his public-facing brand by Kindness Is Cool, which became the umbrella for the nonprofit, the merchandise line, and the broader giving operation.

That doesn't mean the Mental Health Movement is gone. The organization still exists, the scholarship still operates, and the @mentalhealth.mvmt Instagram account remains live. But it's a quieter project now, sitting underneath the much louder MDMotivator and Kindness Is Cool brands rather than functioning as the public face.

In a sense, MHM is the original DNA of the project. Everything else grew out of it. The first viral TikToks were about depression symptoms. The first organized venture was about destigmatizing mental health. The first scholarship was for students dealing with mental illness. By the time the Kindness Is Cool clothing line launched in late 2023, MDMotivator had already been doing structured mental health philanthropy for three years.

What's Happening With Both Co-Founders Now

Zachery's trajectory after MHM is well-documented elsewhere in our series — the move into broader random-acts-of-kindness content, the launch of Slingshot campaigns, the celebrity collaborations.

Dr. Jake Goodman's path has gone in a related but distinct direction. He completed his psychiatry residency, founded Goodman Psychiatry, and continued building one of the largest mental health education audiences on social media. His content remains heavily focused on evidence-based mental health information, professional advice, and reducing stigma. The two creators have remained in adjacent lanes — the activist storyteller and the credentialed psychiatrist — and the Mental Health Movement is the project that originally connected them.

For fans who want to deepen their engagement with the mental health side of Zachery's work, following Dr. Goodman directly at @jakegoodmanmd is one of the best things you can do. His content is the medical complement to MDMotivator's emotional one.

Coming Up Next

Now that we've covered the foundations, the brands, the production, and the early projects, we move into the videos themselves. Our next article goes deep on the single most-watched MDMotivator moment of 2025: the Detroit story of Chantwan, the homeless Army veteran whose mystery basketball choice changed his life forever.

Sources

This article is part of an independent fan site dedicated to documenting the work, life, and impact of Zachery Dereniowski (MDMotivator). We are not affiliated with Zachery, his team, Kindness Is Cool, the Mental Health Movement, the KindnessWithZachery Foundation, or any of his sponsors. All content is researched and written by fans, sourced from public material, and intended as celebratory and informational. To follow Zachery directly, visit @mdmotivator on TikTok or Instagram.