Founder of Burnout Clinic Faces His Own Collapse

Founder Who Built a Burnout Clinic Ignored His Own Collapse

The founder most people turned to when everything was falling apart did not recognize his own collapse until his life was already on fire.

For years, Jan was the quiet name behind a discreet Swiss burnout and recovery clinic for founders, CEOs, and ultra-wealthy families. Executives paid more per week than most people earn in a year for his team to stabilize their nervous systems, rebuild their lives, and send them back into the world with tools to cope.

On paper, he was the last person who should have missed the signs. In reality, he was running on fumes, rationalizing every symptom as the inevitable cost of building something important.

“I spent more than a decade helping other people recover from burnout, depression, and addiction. I still convinced myself that what I was feeling was just a rough patch and that the company needed me to push through.”

This is the story of the founder who built a burnout clinic for others and then ignored his own collapse, and what early-stage founders and indie hackers can learn from the gap between what he knew and how he lived.

Early Days: A Problem Hiding in Plain Sight

Before the clinic, Jan grew up around mental health work. His parents were professionals in the space, and their home occasionally became an unofficial refuge for people who could not safely fall apart in public.

The turning point came when a friend of a friend, a high-profile CEO of a publicly listed company, needed immediate, discreet help for addiction. The risk was not just personal embarrassment. If word got out, the company’s stock price and thousands of jobs could be affected.

There was no off-the-shelf solution. No existing center could guarantee the privacy, speed, and level of personalized attention this person needed. So Jan’s parents did what founders do before they call themselves founders: they improvised. They moved the CEO into their guest room and built a temporary, highly tailored program around them.

Jan watched this unfold and saw something most people missed.

“The entrepreneur in me realized there was a niche here. There were people at the top of the pyramid who could not just walk into a regular clinic. They needed discretion, customization, and a different kind of environment to even agree to get help.”

He already had experience in consulting and medical concierge services, and he had dabbled in his own ventures in travel and services. The pieces clicked into place: what if there was a dedicated clinic for burnout, addiction, and mental health that operated like a luxury, one-client-at-a-time retreat for people who were used to having an entire organization orbiting around them?

The first version was scrappy, intimate, and far from the polished image that later headlines would describe.

In 2011, Jan co-founded a high-end mental health clinic with his mother and then stepfather. They started with a simple but radical premise: one-on-one care, where the entire program adapted to the individual, not the other way around.

In 2012, that seed evolved into Paracelsus Recovery, the name that would eventually become shorthand in certain circles for “the place you go when you cannot afford for the world to see you fall apart.”

The early days were not glamorous. Ultra-wealthy clients were cautious, reputation took years to build, and the pricing that made the model viable also became its biggest hurdle. Jan and the team were selling something their buyers did not want to admit they needed.

“For a long time, we had only a handful of clients. The concept made sense on paper, but stigma and ego are powerful forces. Many of the people we could help most were still convinced they could outrun their problems if they just worked harder.”

Key Milestones: From Quiet Experiment to Global Magnet

First Clients and Proof of Concept

The first milestone was not a funding round. It was the moment a second and then a third client arrived through trusted referrals and walked away with a visibly different trajectory.

Word spread inside tight, high-net-worth ecosystems: family offices, wealth membership organizations, and private networks that exist far from startup Twitter. A family office partner would whisper to another, a board member would quietly ask for a card after a meeting, a relative would step in when an heir spiraled.

Each successful case did two things:

• Validated that ultra-high-touch, high-cost mental health care could save careers, marriages, and companies.
• Reinforced the idea that protecting a public image often mattered more to these clients than admitting the depth of their pain.

Jan’s model focused on extreme personalization. A typical stay could include a private residence with lake views, a full medical workup, daily psychotherapy, a chef, a driver, complementary therapies, and live-in support. The numbers were staggering: up to around $130,000 per week, sometimes stretching over six weeks or more.

Founders and executives showed up with familiar patterns. They had built teams, brands, and wealth, but also elaborate systems to hide their deterioration. Assistants covered for absences. Spouses smoothed over outbursts. Boards rationalized erratic behavior as “visionary intensity.” By the time they arrived, they were often at a breaking point.

“Average workers usually get told they cannot keep showing up late or drunk. For founders and top executives, there is a whole orbit of people protecting them from consequences. They tend to seek help much later, when the crash is already in motion.”

Scaling Without Looking Like You Are Scaling

Paracelsus Recovery never scaled in the way software founders talk about scaling. It did not open dozens of locations or serve thousands at once. Its growth looked more like deepening a niche:

• Refining the model to treat only a handful of clients at a time, often three or four, to maintain a personal atmosphere.
• Building relationships with gatekeepers: family offices, private banks, and membership groups who could refer the exact type of client they sought.
• Expanding the toolkit, adding modalities like acupuncture, yoga, and later, inspired by Jan’s own journey, techniques such as breathwork and shiatsu.

Revenue grew quietly. Outcomes spoke louder than marketing copy ever could. For more than a decade, Jan was the calm voice in the storm for other people’s crises.

He was also ignoring his own dashboard.

The Quiet Collapse of the Founder Behind the Clinic

By 2022, the pressure that had seemed manageable for years began to compound. The business had weathered economic shifts and global uncertainty. Clients became more complex, and operational demands multiplied.

At the same time, Jan’s personal life started to fracture. His marriage was unraveling. He felt a growing sense that he was barely holding things together. Sleep quality declined, tension became constant, and decision fatigue turned once-clear thinking into sludge.

From the outside, he was the expert in catching burnout early. Internally, he kept telling himself that this was just a rough year, that the team needed him to grind a bit longer, that stepping away would jeopardize everything he had built.

“For the sake of business continuity, I felt I had to hang on. Every time I thought about stepping back, I imagined the clinic collapsing or patients being let down, so I just pushed harder.”

He tried outpatient therapy in between meetings, as though a few hours of structured reflection could offset years of accumulated strain. The slide continued. Work felt heavier. Personal relationships deteriorated. The founder who built a clinic to stabilize other people could not stabilize himself.

About six months later, he checked himself into an inpatient clinic in Zurich. Not his own. Another facility, with about 75 patients, more standardized programming, and far less personalization than the world he had designed for his clients.

The diagnosis: acute depression triggered by stress, with overlapping symptoms of burnout. The very thing he had seen in others over and over had finally caught up to him.

“I still have brain fog, and my memory is worse than it used to be. I do not know if it will ever fully come back. I missed my own red flags because I always put the needs of the business and the clients first.”

Ironically, his time as a patient reshaped parts of the business he had started as a founder. Experiencing care from the other side of the table gave him new empathy and ideas, such as integrating more body-based therapies and rethinking how aftercare was emphasized.

But the cost was real. This was not a founder sabbatical; it was an emergency landing.

Lessons Learned: Practical Insights for Other Founders

Underneath the luxury setting and high-profile clientele, Jan’s story is painfully familiar to early-stage founders and indie hackers. The specifics are different, but the patterns are the same: deferring your needs, rationalizing warning signs, and assuming that collapse happens only to other people.

Lesson 1: Expertise Does Not Grant Immunity

Knowing the science of burnout, reading all the books, or even building a company around mental health does not make you immune. If anything, it can make self-deception easier because you feel you “should” know better.

• Treat your own symptoms as seriously as you would treat them in a friend or customer. If you would tell a client to step back, change pace, or seek help, apply the same standard to yourself.
• Separate identity from role. Being “the resilient founder” or “the mental health person” can trap you in a persona that prevents you from admitting when you are not okay.

Lesson 2: Invisible Support Systems Can Delay the Crash

One reason founders and executives hit the wall so hard is that they are often surrounded by people who soften the immediate consequences: partners, assistants, team members, even loyal customers. That support is valuable, but it can also hide how unsustainable your pace has become.

• Create at least one space in your life where no one benefits from you “keeping it together.” This might be a therapist, coach, peer founder group, or trusted friend outside your industry.
• Watch for lagging indicators, not just urgent crises. Chronic irritability, constant fatigue, shrinking creativity, or numbness toward wins can be early signs that you are not just tired; you are burning out.

Lesson 3: Continuity of the Business Is Not Worth the Total Loss of the Founder

Jan kept pushing because he believed stepping away might threaten the clinic’s continuity. That tradeoff is familiar: “If I slow down, the company will die.” The unspoken alternative is that if you do not slow down, you might break in ways that take much longer to recover from, if at all.

• Shift the question from “Can I afford to step back?” to “What would it cost if I cannot function for six months or more?” Design around that risk before it becomes reality.
• Build small, reversible protections into your operating system: share critical context with at least one other person, document key processes, and plan for short founder absences as a normal, expected part of the business.

“Success, for me now, is not just a business that functions. It is someone leaving with the tools to live a better life. That includes me. I had to learn that the real work starts after the acute crisis, and that I am not exempt from doing it.”

Closing: Turning Someone Else’s Collapse into Your Early Warning

Most founder stories romanticize grit and endurance. This one is more uncomfortable. It asks whether the thing you are building is secretly training you to ignore your own limits, even as you help others find theirs.

Jan’s journey shows that collapse rarely happens out of nowhere. It is a slow accumulation of ignored signals, rationalized for the sake of a mission, a team, or a market opportunity. Eventually, the bill arrives.

You might not be running a $130,000-a-week burnout clinic, but you might be doing the same thing on a smaller scale: giving your best thinking to customers while offering your own health whatever scraps of time and energy remain.

The invitation is simple, not easy. Take your own warning signs as seriously as you would a customer’s crisis. Build systems that assume you are human, not an infinite resource. Let stories like this one be an early checkpoint, not a mirror you recognize only in hindsight.

What is your biggest takeaway from this journey? Share your thoughts in the comments below!