An Arizona company has won a $3 million grant from the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs for a mental health app that aims to reduce suicide by military veterans on the Navajo Nation.
The company, Phoenix-based Televëda Systems Inc., was founded in response to co-founder Shruti Gurudanti’s observation of a massively underserved healthcare problem: isolation.
“I was very close with my grandfather who suffered from age-related chronic conditions that made him homebound,” Gurudanti said, according to the company’s website. “It was a difficult time, and one that made me come to a stark realization: loneliness and social isolation are massive healthcare problems that need to be addressed. Loneliness is a major predictor of functional decline and death, and bringing individuals together can improve a society’s physical, mental, and social health.”
Televëda’s grant-winning project, Project Hózhó—meaning ‘balance’ in Diné—is a mental health app in development that’s designed for and by Navajo veterans. Televëda is creating the app in partnership with Black Hills Center For American Indian Health, an organization aimed at improving the health of Natives living on reservations in South Dakota and Arizona.
The app will use traditional storytelling and talking circles in a hybrid format, with an aim to reduce veteran suicide and improve access to Veterans Affairs resources.
While Native Americans serve in the United States’ armed forces at five times the national average, Native veterans also suffer from disproportionate suicide rates. Over the past two decades, suicide rates among Native American and Alaska Native veterans receiving care in the Veterans Health Administration system increased by nearly 150%, according to a study conducted by researchers for the US Department of Veterans Affairs Rocky Mountain Mental Illness Research, Education, and Clinical Center for Suicide Prevention and published in Medical Care in March 2022.
Read more at NativeNewsOnline.net.
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