Sophia Noori is a Yale-trained psychiatrist, trauma therapist, and as we learned during our conversation, a jazz saxophonist who plays in her department's band. She is not a bluffer. When she says she's going to do something, she does it.
She's also the co-founder and CEO of Nema Health, a trauma-focused mental health company built around an intensive care model that helps survivors overcome their PTSD diagnosis in an average of 39 days. For context: The average patient at Nema has been living with PTSD for 18 years.
Here are three things Jill and I learned from sitting down with Sofia.
Therapy Is Medicine. And Like Medicine, the Dose Matters.
Most of us have a picture in our heads of what therapy looks like: You sit down, your therapist asks how your week went, you talk through what's on your mind, then you leave and repeat next week. Sophia isn't here to knock that. But she is here to point out that it isn't actually a treatment protocol.
There's no clinical guideline that says therapy should be dosed once per week. And for trauma survivors specifically, the research points in a different direction entirely. Higher doses of trauma therapy, multiple sessions per week, produce better outcomes, faster completion rates, and less distress between sessions. Peeling back the wound, and waiting six days to address it again, is actively harder for some people.
What Sophia and her co-founder Isabelle built at Nema is a model designed around the question:If you were designing care for someone you loved, what would actually give them the best chance? The answer led them to intensive treatment. And the results, 39 days to recovery on average, speak for themselves.
Vicarious Trauma Isn't the Whole Story. Vicarious Joy Is Real Too.
One of the first things Sophia worried about when building Nema was clinician burnout. Trauma work is heavy. Case after case, she expected it to grind people down.
What she found instead surprised her. Her therapists aren't burning out. They're energized. Because they get to watch people get better — visibly, measurably, within weeks. She calls it vicarious joy, and it's become one of the more unexpected pillars of how Nema thinks about team wellbeing.
It's also worth noting that the therapy model itself is protective for clinicians. The approach Nema uses doesn't require therapists to sit with a patient's full trauma narrative in detail; it focuses on the impact of the trauma, not the retelling of it. That distinction matters more than you'd think.
Purpose isn’t a buzzword for teams that do important and emotionally demanding work. When people can actually see the impact of what they do — clearly, quickly, and undeniably — it changes everything.
70% of Your Workforce Has Experienced Trauma. Here's What You Owe Them.
Somewhere between 70% to 80% of adults have experienced at least one traumatic event. Those people are showing up to your all-hands, your one-on-ones, your Slack channels, every single day.
Sophia was careful here, and we think the nuance is important. Trauma is part of the human condition — it doesn't automatically mean PTSD, it doesn't define people, and the worst thing an employer can do is over-fragilize someone who has moved through something hard and built a full life on the other side. People don't want to be reduced to their history.
But for those who do have active symptoms, the research is clear. Trauma-informed workplace practices, prevention training, and accessible pathways to real care actually reduce PTSD risk.
Sophia's mandate to leaders is straightforward: Don't treat trauma as a monolith, don't make it an identity, and don't assume silence means everyone is fine. Support your people, connect them to resources when they need it, and understand that the person across from you in a meeting may be carrying something you can't see.
What Gives Her Hope.
Sophia's hope for the future of work? Flexibility — real, structural flexibility. As a working mom running a fully remote company, she knows firsthand what it means to be able to see her baby throughout the day and still show up fully for her team and her patients. Post-COVID, she's hopeful we don't give that back.
Jill and I feel the same. And we hope listeners walk away from this one thinking a little differently about the word "treatment" and asking whether the care their company offers is actually designed to work.
Listen to the full episode of Work Made Human to hear more from Sophia Noori — including what it was like to go through COVID while treating patients, why she had to learn to take off her clinician hat as a CEO, and her jazz saxophonist origin story.
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