COLORADO SPRINGS — Jonathan Wilson said the transition from the Navy SEALS to civilian life was one of the hardest things he’s ever done. He called it a dark period in his life.
He went from the strict structure of the military to navigating life without purpose and without his team, as he put it.
“I sometimes say it's pretty similar to prison. You wake up, you know what you're going to do that day. You know what you're doing for the next two years,” said Wilson. “You got meals. You got training. We know where we're going to go.”
Wilson got a job working for Goldman Sachs. He said everyone congratulated him, but he had no passion or purpose. But he also suffered from his time in the military. He served two separate stints for 15 years altogether. He had PTSD, lost friends, and was not okay.
“I was driving to work one day, and I didn't even know it happened, but I just remember looking over this bridge I was driving over and thinking, ‘How easy would that be?’” Wilson said when asked if he ever experienced suicidal ideations. “And that's not a thought I normally had, right?”
Wilson sought help and was dissatisfied with the VA. He gave credit to the doctors and personnel, but said the bureaucracy and sheer size of the organization made it difficult for him.
He first started a foundation to help other servicemembers transition to civilian life with job placement and education.
But in 2017, everything changed when they lost their first teammate to suicide.
“We actually had a SEAL we were supposed to meet with Monday morning. So our foundation was helping this transitioning SEAL, and over the weekend, he shot himself,” said Wilson. “So to lose our first in 2017 we fast forward to 2024, in that short period, we've lost a lot of really good men to suicide because they felt like they didn't have another 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 comprise about 14% of all suicides, according to recent data from the Pew Research Center and Department of Veteran Affairs.
Wilson said from 2017 through the present, he lost more SEAL teammates to suicide than during his entire 15 years of service.
For him, it was time to shine a light into the darkness and help his brethren. Wilson returned to grad school, attending Oxford in England in an MBA program where he developed his Invi Mind Health App.
Invi, which stands for invisible visible, is an app that can be downloaded to any phone and connects either to the phone’s health apps or to a person’s wearable device (like a FitBit or Garmin watch).
“We pull the biometrics from that–and we worked with lead doctors from around the country to include Walter Reed–and we weight those different biometrics, and we give you the trend lines around your mental health,” explained Wilson. “So we're all going to experience ups and downs. It's normal. What we really care about is those huge deviations downwards. And then we alert you with personalized solutions.”
The app uses a machine learning algorithm that collects data to better adjust 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 recognized they could find the correlations between something like depression and anxiety and heart rate variability.
Wilson acknowledged that his first presentation of the device to a group of Navy SEALS was met with skepticism about sharing personal data.
He said he took those criticisms to heart and implemented data protection twice as strict as required by the government and that users are de-identified. He said there is also an option to dump the data if someone chooses to.
Invi also has a “Swim Buddy” feature, which is an idea taken straight from the Navy SEALS. Wilson said during his service, everywhere he went, his swim buddy went.
“We have the same concept built in there. If your score deviates far enough, it alerts your teammate–your swim buddy–sends them a text,” Wilson said. “They get a text, they read it, and then it says, ‘Just check in on Johnny today, his score is down.’ And sometimes it's nothing. And if it is something, at least, you can start the conversation of what's going on. Let's have a real conversation.”
The app fully launched last year, so Wilson said there is still a lot more he wants to do with it. But for now, he’s confident they’ve saved some lives already.
Wilson, now living in Parker, Colorado with his wife and five children, said he plans to scale his product to serve not only vets, but first responders, athletes, adolescents, and anyone who needs it.
“It may feel and look like a military or a first responder application or app right now,” he said. “But the reality is, we're going to as fast as we can, try to service as many people as possible.”
Email Senior Reporter Brett Forrest at brett.forrest@koaa.com. Follow @brettforrestTVon X and Brett Forrest News on Facebook.
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