Jewel
Jewel is taking her mission to scale mental health support to the metaverse.
The multiplatinum-selling music artist, who for decades has been championing mental and emotional wellbeing through avenues including her Inspiring Children Foundation, is the co-founder of a new platform called Innerworld that makes resources accessible via a social virtual world managed by trained non-professionals and steeped in cognitive behavioral tools.
Innerworld—which is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health and available in VR on Meta Quest and on flat screens via Mac, PC, iPad and iPhone—enables anyone seeking support to create an avatar and enter a world where they can find immediate resources on topics including coping with depression, loss, anxiety and ADHD; peer support groups for things like chronic illness and addiction recovery; and one-on-one assistance.
The space is monitored 24/7 by live guides and bolstered AI that can monitor for key words to make sure if someone is in danger a live person can intervene. The guides are also there to welcome people and ensure they adhere to Innerworld’s guidelines, which include no conversation about politics or religion, no bullying, no trolling, no negativity.
“The platform works really beautifully, I think, because of the anonymity. People feel safe coming in,” Jewel says. “It’s an incredibly safe environment by design.”
Innerworld was not designed to be therapy or crisis intervention. Rather, it’s a peer-based model that can function as an alternative or complement to traditional therapy and structures.
“What I’ve done in the Foundation for the past 20 years is a peer-to-peer model, and we actually see a lot more profound results than one-on-one,” Jewel says. “I think psychotherapy is great, but it isn’t something everybody has access to. And meditation is incredibly important and there are so many great meditation apps out there but what I’ve learned is that meditation puts you in position to change, but then you need behavioral tools to start to change actual habits.”
Jewel’s focus in recent years on accessibility naturally led her to the virtual realm.
“I had been tasking myself to come up with solutions that were genuinely scalable. And for me, VR was really where I was focusing,” she says. “We have a lot of people who use this as a supplement to their therapeutic work and we have people who don’t have access to therapeutic or other traditional service. They are getting incredible results, and there are people from all over the world—which is what’s so amazing about VR.”
It also led her to Innerworld’s founder and CEO Noah Robinson, who during his clinical psychology PhD research at Vanderbilt University developed a suite of science-based, Cognitive Behavioral Immersion tools and who had been beta-testing and iterating a peer-to-peer virtual platform for more than three years with 10,000-plus users.
Like Jewel, who grew up in Alaska and moved away from her family when she was 15 due to an abusive household, Robinson’s lived experience informed his passion for helping others.
“When I was 13 I realized I was gay, and I became depressed and anxious, and the thought of coming out gave me a huge amount of anxiety,” he says. “I went to therapy but it didn’t help.”
His only relief came in the form of a multiplayer online video game. “I basically lived in that world. I was failing my classes in the real world, my parents took away the Internet and I snaked the cable through the entire house so I would have a secret computer to play on. It was my lifeline, and ultimately it saved my life. I was thinking about harming myself as an adolescent but what kept me going was this virtual world. I was an avatar and I had a community of people. I had friends, and I had accomplishments in the game.”
Robinson eventually came out to his gaming community and says the support he received there gave him the foundation to do so in the real world, where he was met with far greater acceptance than he had feared.
“That experience led me to think, What if we could build something that did allow people to escape, but while they were escaping we could actually teach them tools for handling the real world and coping strategies so they could come back to reality more empowered then they left it,” he says.
Results from Innerworld are affirming the hypothesis.
“There are so many incredible stories of end users who have experienced complete transformations of their lives,” he says. “We have people who couldn’t speak in meetings they had such social anxiety, even in that environment as an avatar, when they first attended. And now they are leading group meetings and helping others. One of the users called it viral healing.”
“The launch of this platform has been incredibly rewarding,” says Jewel. “I just feel like where I’m at, where technology is at and where culture is at… we have a real shot at healing.”