New mental health app brings resources to LGBTQ+ people in US

(Images from Voda.co)

An app that gives LGBTQ+ folx access to personalized mental health resources for coming out, coping with gender dysphoria and more will soon be freely accessible to 100 queer individuals in rural communities.

Voda, a new LGBTQIA+ mental well-being app, and AspenOUT, the nonprofit behind Aspen Gay Ski Week, are partnering to provide 100 free memberships to Voda+, which provides an AI-powered custom support toolbox to fit each individual’s personal journey.

The app was born out of the mind of Jaron Soh, co-founder and CEO of Voda. According to Soh, he saw a need for stronger mental health resources in the community after growing up in Singapore.

“I knew I was gay from a young age, and from the moment I knew, I knew it was something I had to hide, before I even knew what ‘gay’ was,” Soh said.

Same-sex sexual activity between men was recently decriminalized in Singapore in 2022, according to Human Rights Watch.

“I just carried that with me into adulthood and it was only in my late 20s when I started going to therapy that I realized I was carrying so much emotional baggage and how that manifested into dysfunctional relationships in my life,” Soh said.

According to Soh, therapy helped him realize the need for mental health resources in his own community.

“I look at all my friends and I’m like ‘Oh, you all need this as well’ because we were all having dysfunctional relationships with love, with work, but also with alcohol, with substances or with our phones, anything to numb ourselves and not have to sit with ourselves, and that’s what gave me the idea with Voda,” he said.

For the partnership, the focus is on providing free membership to rural communities where mental health resources may be the scarcest.

“Personally, I know growing up in a small town I did not have access to [Gay Straight Alliance] groups in school. I grew up in Vero Beach, Florida, a small town with a Christian church on every street corner, and being gay wasn’t necessarily celebrated,” Lukas Volk, AspenOUT’s Executive Programming and Marketing Director, said.

The program officially launched earlier this month during Aspen Gay Ski Week, which is the oldest annual weeklong gay ski fundraiser event in the nation. AspenOUT celebrated the partnership during their youth event with art activities, ice skating and live music.

“AspenOUT partnered with Voda because we noticed a focus on creating healthy habits amongst Q+ youth and beyond. The data trends are clear, youth suicide and Q+ youth suicides are increasing,” Volk said.

According to the 2024 U.S. National Survey on the Mental Health of LGBTQ+ people by The Trevor Project, 39% of LGBTQ+ young people seriously considered attempting suicide in the past year — including 46% of transgender and nonbinary young people, and 50% of LGBTQ+ youth wanted mental health care but were not able to get it.

“Organizations need to pause and ask ourselves why this is happening, extend our services to the furthest rural areas, and develop healthy habits before thoughts of self-harm pop up. Voda is the answer to all of these. Voda will help develop healthy mental health habits early on and show rural Q+ youth that not only are there millions of folks just like them, we are a healthy, thriving community,” Volk said.

Applications are now being accepted for the 100 free memberships and will be managed through AspenOUT’s website. Applicants must meet eligibility criteria, including residency in rural areas, financial need and self-identification as LGBTQ+.

According to AspenOUT and Voda, they agreed for all that apply that there is little chance any will be denied. The app also has a variety of free modules that are accessible to everyone.

“If you want to put up right now you can find like a 15-minute module on coping with hate speech. But once you are kind of done with that, you learn a basic, you know, exercise or two, and you finish. With Voda+ if you’re particularly struggling with hate speech on social media, you get a ten-day plan using AI that helps you for ten days. You work on it every day, ten minutes for ten days, that I think is a little more powerful,” Soh said.

According to Voda, they plan on releasing more free content, similar to the hate speech module, that will help queer individuals navigate the political climate amid new legislation coming from the Trump administration.

“So we currently have 28,000-29,000 users and most of our users and our community is actually based in the U.S.,” Soh said.

According to Soh, Voda has plans to release modules on coping with political anxiety, trolling on social media, building healthy boundaries with social media, being an active digital bystander and ways to get involved in community organizing, with the content being created by a team of LGBTQ+ therapists.

Soh said he acknowledges President Donald Trump’s recent executive order declaring the federal government only recognizes “two sexes, male and female.”

“Just seeing all those headlines and and and sort of media trolls and negative comments and people, I think the media planting the seeds of prejudice in trying to paint trans people as dangerous is something that we want to work really hard to circumvent,” Soh said.

AspenOUT said they plan to navigate the new legislation as their predecessors did.

“AspenOUT was spawned from an almost identical moment in time: two men weren’t allowed to dance with one another in a local bar back in 1977. We know all too well that civil rights are on the chopping block and we’ll navigate the new legislation just as our predecessors did, with intelligence, patience and logic. The Q+ Community has been around since humans existed, we aren’t going anywhere,” Volk said.

For more information on the new Voda app, go to Voda.co. For more information on AspenOUT, visit AspenOUT.com.

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