App designed to curb suicides among veterans, created by a Colorado man, former Navy SEAL

COLORADO SPRINGS – Jonathan Wilson said transitioning from the Navy SEALS to civilian life was one of the hardest things he has ever done. He called it a dark period in his life.

He went from the strict structure of the military to a life without purpose and without his team, as he put it.

“I sometimes say that it is quite similar to prison. When you wake up, you know what you are going to do that day. You know what you’re going to do for the next two years,” Wilson said. “You have meals. You have undergone training. We know where we are going.”

Wilson got a job at Goldman Sachs. He said everyone congratulated him, but he had no passion or purpose. But he also suffered from his time in the army. He served two separate stints for a total of fifteen years. He had PTSD, lost friends and wasn’t doing well.

“One day I was driving to work and I didn’t even know it was happening, but I just remember looking over the bridge I was driving over and thinking, ‘How easy would that be?’” Wilson said when told asked if he ever experienced suicidal thoughts. “And that’s not a thought I normally have, is it?”

Wilson sought help and was dissatisfied with the VA. He gave credit to the doctors and staff, but said the bureaucracy and size of the organization made it difficult for him.

He first established a foundation to help other military personnel transition to civilian life through job placement and education.

But everything changed in 2017 when they lost their first teammate to suicide.

“We actually had a SEAL that we were supposed to meet on Monday morning. So our foundation helped this SEAL in transition, and this weekend he shot himself,” Wilson said. “So to lose our first one in 2017, fast forward to 2024. In that short period of time we lost a lot of very good men to suicide because they felt like they had no other option. They felt like the system was failing them. And I somewhat agree with them.”

Veterans make up about 6% of the US adult population, but account for about 14% of all suicides, according to recent data from the Pew Research Center And Department of Veterans Affairs.

Wilson said that from 2017 to now, he has lost more SEAL teammates to suicide than in his entire 15 years of service.

For him it was time to shine a light in the darkness and help his brothers. Wilson returned to graduate school and went to Oxford, England for an MBA program where he developed his Invi Mind Health app.

Invi, which stands for invisible visibleis an app that can be downloaded to any phone and connects to the phone’s health apps or to a person’s wearable device (such as a FitBit or Garmin watch).

“From that we take the biometric data – and we’ve worked with top physicians from across the country, including Walter Reed – and we weigh those different biometric data, and we give you the trend lines around your mental health,” Wilson explains. “So we’re all going to go through ups and downs. It’s normal. What we really care about are those enormous downward deviations. And then we warn you with personalized solutions.”

The app uses a machine learning algorithm that collects data to better adapt to the user’s mental health trend lines and identify the best solutions. These devices provide heart rate, sleep cycles and more, so Wilson and his team realized they could find the correlations between something like depression and anxiety and heart rate variability.

Wilson acknowledged that his initial presentation of the device to a group of Navy SEALS was met with skepticism about sharing personal data.

He said he has taken these criticisms to heart and implemented data protection twice as stringent as required by the government, and that users are anonymized. He said there is also an option to dump the data if someone chooses to do so.

Invi also has a “Swim Buddy” feature, an idea straight from the Navy SEALS. Wilson said that during his time in the service, his swimming buddy went everywhere.

“We have incorporated the same concept there. If your score is off far enough, your teammate (your swimming buddy) will be alerted and send a text message,” Wilson said. “They get a text, they read it, and it says, ‘Come see Johnny today, his score has dropped.’ And sometimes it’s nothing. And if anything, at least you can start the conversation about what’s going on. Let’s have a real conversation.”

The app was fully launched last year, so Wilson said he wants to do a lot more with it. But for now, he’s confident they’ve already saved some lives.

Wilson, who now lives in Parker, Colorado, with his wife and five children, said he plans to scale up his product to serve not only veterinarians, but also first responders, athletes, adolescents and anyone else who needs it.

“It may feel and look like a military or first aid application or app at this point,” he said. “But the reality is we’re trying to serve as many people as possible as quickly as possible.”

Email senior reporter Brett Forrest at [email protected]. To follow @brettforrestTVon X and Brett Forrest News on Facebook.

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