TAHOE CITY, Calif. – After selling his company, Mark Gogolewski moved to Lake Tahoe. “You would expect yourself to be pretty happy” he said. “And, I almost died.” He breaks down this reality and overcoming addiction in his new book, How to Be OK (When You’re Supposed to Be OK But You’re Not).

It didn’t take long after moving to Lake Tahoe for things to unravel for Gogolewski. “I just started falling apart because I was supposed to be not just okay,” he recalls, “I mean, everybody thought I was literally living the dream.”

Years later, he was divorced, in and out of detox, rehab and the hospital.

He came to realize that he wasn’t alone. “When I talk around, there [are] lots of people who have a pretty good life, but they just, for some reason, they feel empty.”

In his book, he highlights what he believes is an often overlooked crisis of addiction and mental health challenges in high achieving men. “Successful men,” he explains, “have a very specific form of depression, and it’s a form that they don’t even understand is depression.”

The more he spoke with men of this background, the more he realized how consistent the story was. He talks about his personal struggles to overcoming addiction while a part of this demographic.

“My problem and the reason I couldn’t get myself to go to rehab to really get help is because I was a functional alcoholic who mostly succeeded everywhere in life, and I didn’t want to admit to my sons that I was a failure.”

In sharing these struggles in his book, he also reflects on how men experience these issues differently and that men’s mental health continues to be significantly under addressed.

“Men’s struggles with mental health are tangled up in their masculinity,” he says. “Rather than try to ignore or even criticize that, I wanted to tackle it head on and give advice to men in a language they understand right now.”

He has come to learn that many men struggle with traditional therapy and addiction programs and offers advice in his book to men at their level . “A lot of important advice for men facing addiction and other mental health issues is inadvertently packaged in ways that men resist,” says Gogolewski. “I hope that by talking to men as men, we can get them the help that they really need.”

He hopes his vulnerability in sharing his experiences not only sparks long due conversations on the topic of men’s mental health and addiction, but also begins to redefine the term “addict.”

In addition to being an entrepreneur, Gogolewski has done startup advising and investing. He is also a filmmaker and produced the documentary, Buried: The 1982 Alpine Meadows Avalanche. Gogolewski is now serving as executive producer of Martin Scorsese’s adaptation of the documentary.

These are all pursuits that have required a lot of risk, but he says some the greatest risks have been related to the process of overcoming addiction, being honest with himself and his family, getting the help he needed, and in sharing his experience.

“The book was wonderful to write, but emotionally difficult to publish,” he says, and explains the experience has changed his understanding of vulnerability, the power and necessity for it.

Now on the other side of addiction, he says he is far happier than he could have imagined being.

“I can tell you, you can get knocked down way, way low,” he says, “and come back.”

He hopes his book doesn’t just reach men, but any adult experiencing addiction as well as their loved ones.

How to Be OK (When You’re Supposed to Be OK But You’re Not) is available in hardcover, paperback and Kindle formats with Amazon and Barnes & Noble.