On Oct. 4, 2016, Jeffrey Johnston received the phone call no father ever wants to get.
His oldest son, Seth, was found dead in a hotel room in Waterloo from a fentanyl overdose.
When he told his two other sons about the tragedy, he framed it this way:
“Boys, we have one of two roads to go down. We have one road of anger, despair and hatred, and we become alcoholics and addicts ourselves, or we have a road of love, hope and inspiration,” he recalled during a talk at ENTREFest, an entrepreneurship and innovation conference held in Iowa City in June. “This can be the single greatest moment in our lives to make a difference in the lives of others.”
Tragedy struck his family twice. On June 29, 2021, his wife Prudence, 46, died from complications from alcoholism.
“And so now, in four-and-a-half years, I lost half my family,” he said.
After his wife died, he said, “Enough’s enough.”
“So I came up with this quote: Purpose becomes passion when it gets personal.”
His first project was to raise money for charity but that didn’t go as planned. He was on a camping trip with one of his sons, ruminating about failure.
“And I remember seeing the campfire, my son goes, ‘Dad, what are you gonna do next?’” said Johnston, who resides in Cedar Rapids. “And I said, ‘Well, it’s a good question. I want to meet people where they’re at. I want to dedicate my life to helping others.’ And he goes, ‘Why don’t you build an app?’”
Within 30 days, he started the app known as Brightn, of which he became founder and CEO. Brightn is a mental wellness planning app.
“What I found when I took my story on the road was that the numbers really confirmed what I saw,” he said, noting that 900 people every day die in the U.S. from “deaths of despair,” including drug and alcohol addiction and suicide.
He said 1 in 5 U.S. adults are in a mental health crisis and 90% of Americans believe the country is in a mental health crisis.
“I started looking at why is it so many people are drowning in despair today?” he said. “In a country like America, we have so much abundance, we have everything in the palm of our hands. Why are we so miserable?”
He said the app could have helped his family through their struggles.
“This is what I want to do: Help people never get the phone call that I got,” he said. “What if we could reach people before crisis, and could technology and AI be a force for good?”
Johnston said he wanted to build a system that prevents crisis instead of reacts.
“We need more of this prevention,” he said. “There’s no downside to prevent a fire, and in our system today, what we think we’re doing is throwing water on a mental health inferno, but we’re throwing gasoline up.”
Among the capabilities of Brightn are an AI-powered journaling app.
“AI is really good at memory recall and pattern recognition, those are two things that AI is better than humans at,” Johnston said.
He said that 99% of people’s mental health happens between visits to the therapist or the doctor.
“Ninety-nine percent of your mental health life is 2 a.m. in the morning … it’s Sunday night when you dread going to work because you don’t like your boss,” he said. “That’s where mental health lives. It doesn’t live with your therapist.”
Johnston said he wanted a tool that could share information that would help facilitate meetings between the doctor or therapist.
“So … when you show up, it’s not just ‘How you doing’ ‘I’m doing OK,’ it’s, ‘Oh, thanks for sending me your last 10 journal entries, Jeff, now I know what you’re thinking about, let’s get into the root of the problem here.’”
Among Brightn’s partners are OpenLoop Health, a Des Moines-based telehealth company that allows users to make medical appointments in the app.
“If you’re struggling and you’re using Brightn and you want to talk to a therapist, you can book a therapist right on the app now and not have to leave the app,” Johnston said. “That’s very rare in the prevention space. … I kept thinking of Brightn as a highway, and I want to have off-ramps.”
Johnston’s story has not ended. Three weeks after his son Seth died, his daughter – Johnston’s grandaughter – was born.
“She is [almost] 10 now, and her name is Brighton,” he said.