She spent years helping organisations perform. Then depression took away her ability to read a page. Swiss founder Susan Stucki has turned the darkest year of her life into Bridge to Recovery — a path back for those who come after her.
Imagine opening a book and finding that the words will not hold still. Imagine sitting down to write an email and discovering that the sentence you began has already slipped away. For most of us, reading, writing, thinking and remembering are as automatic as breathing.
For Susan Stucki, in 2025, they stopped being automatic.
This is not a story about a meteoric rise. It is a story about a year in which simply getting through the day became the achievement — and about what one woman decided to build once she found her way out.
When the high performer stops performing
On paper, Susan Stucki was the last person anyone would expect to fall. She spent more than a decade in demanding corporate environments, leading at management level and running team workshops across international consulting and finance. Her professional profile has linked her to Bain & Company — a name synonymous with pressure, polish and performance.
But depression does not read a CV before it walks in.
In January 2025, Stucki suffered a breakdown, as reported by journalist Felix Straumann. Severe depression followed. By her own account, it took far more than her mood or her motivation. It reached the very faculties her career was built on: the ability to read, to write, to think clearly, to remember.
Her story quietly dismantles one of the most stubborn myths about mental illness — that competence is a kind of armour. It is not. Executives, managers and high achievers can be brought to a standstill like anyone else.
When one road closes
The usual path did not work. According to Straumann’s reporting, conventional antidepressants and psychotherapy did not bring the improvement she hoped for, and the medication also caused problems with her liver.
So her doctors looked for another road. Her treatment came to include several weeks of ketamine therapy at Privatklinik Hohenegg in Meilen, Switzerland. The clinic has since spoken publicly about her case and thanked her for her openness.
Neither Stucki nor the clinic tells this as a miracle. Hohenegg describes ketamine as an evidence-based option for carefully selected patients with treatment-resistant depression — one part of a wider psychiatric and psychotherapeutic programme, not a standalone cure. Stucki says the same: her recovery came from psychotherapy, individualised clinical care and other therapies working together, with ketamine acting as an important catalyst.
That honesty is the heart of her message. Not here is the answer, but when one road fails, another may still exist.
From survivor to founder
Some people come through illness and want only to close the door behind them. Stucki flung it open.
She began speaking publicly about depression, burnout, treatment-resistant depression and mental health at work — insisting these conversations belong in boardrooms and offices precisely because no level of seniority makes anyone immune.
Then she went further. She founded Bridge to Recovery, a Switzerland-linked initiative that connects recovery support with the Cape Town region of South Africa. Its purpose grows directly from her own experience: helping people keep rebuilding their lives after a clinic stay, especially those living with severe or treatment-resistant depression.
The programmes it coordinates in Cape Town may combine independently provided, medically supervised ketamine treatment with supportive therapies chosen for the individual. The menu is deliberately human:
- personal support and accommodation coordination
- music and expressive-arts therapy
- yoga, Pilates and other restorative activities
- clinical documentation for the patient’s doctors and therapists back home
That last element is the quiet genius of the model. Recovery does not end when the plane lands; the paperwork travels with the patient so their own care team can pick up the thread.
Bridge to Recovery is also clear about its limits. It is not a medical provider and gives no medical advice or treatment — those decisions stay with independent licensed physicians. In Stucki’s vision, Cape Town is not just a destination. It is a span between intensive treatment and ordinary life.
Walking back through the office door
Most mental-health conversations stop at the crisis and the treatment. Few follow the person on the morning they walk back into the office.
Stucki has made that morning her concern. Her own return to work drew her into conversations with HR professionals, psychiatrists and psychologists, and inspired her to develop approaches to sustainable reintegration. Her conviction: there is no universal formula. The right structure depends on the individual, the organisation and its culture.
Here, the two Susan Stuckis meet — the seasoned corporate leader and the woman who became a psychiatric patient. She has not discarded the first identity to make room for the second. Her years in leadership help her understand organisations. Her illness helps her understand the person trying to find their place in one again.
Gold in the cracks
The emblem Stucki chose for Bridge to Recovery says everything. Kintsugi is the Japanese art of mending broken pottery so the fractures are not hidden but made visible — part of the restored piece, even its beauty. Bridge to Recovery uses it as its philosophy: with the right support, life’s breaks do not have to be concealed. They can become part of something new.
It is hard to imagine a truer portrait of its founder. The woman speaking openly about depression today is not trying to erase the woman who fell ill in 2025. She is building from her — and attaching her own name and history to a conversation many professionals still conduct in whispers.
A bridge still under construction
This is not a polished success story with its hard chapters neatly tucked away. Bridge to Recovery is a pilot project, and its first Cape Town programme begins next week. It plans to publish client survey results afterwards. Any verdict on its long-term impact would be premature.
That is exactly what makes this moment worth watching. We are not looking back at a finished chapter; we are watching the next one being written.
Susan Stucki went from a life of leadership and performance to an illness that, for a time, took the very abilities that career rested on. She recovered. She spoke. And now she is building — not because she believes every journey will mirror hers, but because she is convinced no one should be left with only one road home.
Sometimes purpose is born of ambition. Sometimes it grows from success. And sometimes it begins when a person survives something they never imagined facing, and decides the road they finally found should be easier for the next person to see.
For Susan Stucki, that road has a name: Bridge to Recovery.
Editorial note: This feature draws on publicly available information from Susan Stucki, Bridge to Recovery, her professional profile, reporting by Felix Straumann, and material published by Privatklinik Hohenegg. The treatment described reflects Ms Stucki’s individual experience. It is not medical advice, nor evidence that the same treatment will produce the same outcome for anyone else. Anyone struggling with their mental health should speak to a qualified professional.
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