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ST GEORGE — When Kristi and Ryan Holt both began struggling with depression and marital difficulties, they knew they couldn't hide from the risks of not addressing their emotional health.
The couple tried medication to help address their distress but found that they still struggled with depression and anxiety more than ever. That's when they began learning more about the importance of emotional intelligence and awareness.
"We've been taught in our society to avoid, suppress, ignore and numb our human experience," Kristi Holt said. "We are human, and what makes us human is our emotions. And if you're suppressing and numbing emotions, you're not really living."
Negative mental health didn't just affect the Holts; it affected their kids. Raising four children was no simple task, especially with a pandemic and yearlong rise of unhealthy use of social media, Kristi Holt added.
The couple wanted to curate a safe, healthy environment for teens across the nation to address their mental health.
AI to measure emotional state by the sound of a voice
The Holts started the M.E.C.A. Project, a nonprofit organization that helps teens thrive "mentally and emotionally through conscious awareness," last year, according to its website. The organization released its artificial intelligence company Vibeonix in 2017, to provide more mental health resources to teens and young adults.
To enhance the project's resources, the couple worked last year to bring forward AI technology to help teens and adults understand their mental and emotional states.
The couple's startup AI company, Vibeonix, is meant to help measure one's emotional state through their voice, and then, based on their voice patterns, understand what they may be feeling. All one has to do, Kristi Holt said, is speak into the free app for no less than 15 seconds. Then the person will receive a percentage score that gauges their range of emotions.
The technology behind studying voice patterns to better understand emotions is based on several years of open research and 11,000 different case studies, a Vibeonix press release notes.
Utah Tech University event
The Holts plan on bringing awareness to these resources in their first in-person event, Safe 2 Feel, on Saturday at Utah Tech University in St. George.
Safe 2 Feel will provide greater insight into the M.E.C.A. Project, which the couple started as a safe place that could provide a plethora of online resources for teens to become more emotionally aware.
"I think the sustainable response to depression is emotional intelligence," Kristi Holt said, noting that she and her husband better dealt with anxiety and depression by being aware of their mental struggles, rather than numbing it.
During the event, the Holts will detail ways to work through and understand difficult feelings. Curtis Morley, author and entrepreneur, will speak about counterfeit emotions and how to deal with them.
After Morley's friend took his life, he committed to helping others understand the importance of understanding and accepting their feelings.
"If he would have understood the difference between guilt and shame, if he would have understood that some emotions are OK — even though they're painful, they're OK to feel — that he'd still be with us," Morley said.
Morley plans on using his experience with understanding counterfeit emotion, such as unpacking the differences between "guilt" and "shame," to help teens see the harms of allowing counterfeit emotions to affect their actions.
'It helps you understand your own mind'
It's not just Morley who supports the M.E.C.A. Project and its resources; the nonprofit has partnered with teens from all over the country, including Isabella Rose Sky, one of the nonprofit's teen ambassadors and a passionate advocate for mental health.
When Rose Sky was on a Broadway tour for the "School of Rock" musical, she met one of the project's partners, author Amber Trueblood. And just last year, she decided to become involved, seeing how its mission aligned with her goals to educate herself and others on teens' mental health.
"I was searching for mental health content, viewing videos, speeches, any resources — I could definitely tell that these (M.E.C.A. resources) were super helpful. They were super educational. They were really easy to connect to and to learn from," Rose Sky said. "It helps you understand your own mind and your emotions so much better, which also helps you communicate them with other people."
"Our goal with Vibeonix is to introduce technology to help people see within 15 seconds which emotions are present in their energy field," Kristi Holt said.
She says when people use the tech, they can't easily trick it by raising or lowering their intonations — rather, the app measures the frequency of one's voice patterns, thus deducing their emotional state.
Holt's son, Ryder Holt, also noted how Vibeonix has helped him better understand how to help himself through struggles with friends and sports.
Most importantly, however, he said it's helped him realize that he and other teens should have the courage to exist during difficult times.
"Emotions are normal. And it's important to learn about them, know what they are and, again, that they're not you," he said. "You should be here — it works, it helps, and you should be in this world. You should use this because it helped me."
Rose Sky added that, through discussion of the available resources, she hopes that Saturday's event will bring teens closer to their families and give them resources to learn how to assess their mental and emotional health.
"I think this kind of education and awareness for everybody is a wonderful thing, and it can go so far," Rose Sky said. "I'm really glad to see the support happening for the massive projects — and I hope that it can go further."
Correction: An earlier version transposed the dates for the creation of Vibeonix and M.E.C.A.
