I’m John Haven, a retired U.S. Army Captain, and I’m raising funds for myself to develop the Meaning & Mechanism Project. This work grew out of my own experience and a question I haven’t been able to shake. After Ranger and Sapper School, Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning helped me understand how meaning can change our relationship to suffering. Later, a chance conversation with an Afghan veteran who had also read Frankl five times brought that question into sharper focus: could a structured, meaning-centered approach help people living with trauma-related distress, and can that idea be tested safely and responsibly? This fundraiser is not for treatment, and it is not recruiting patients. It is for the careful early-stage work needed to examine whether this idea deserves to move forward.

Your support will help fund four months of focused project development, including my disclosed project-lead stipend, clinical and research design, ethics and legal review, veteran and expert advisor stipends, measurement and privacy planning, responsible AI governance, site feasibility, and public reporting. It will not fund clinical treatment, controlled substances, participant recruitment, or a property purchase. My first goal is simple and honest: to build a transparent, clinician-led feasibility plan that independent experts can challenge and that could prove the idea right, wrong, or incomplete. I will publish the budget, milestones, spending, setbacks, and lessons as the work progresses. Please help me fund the test, not a promise. If this mission speaks to you, I would be deeply grateful for your support and for sharing this fundraiser with others who believe careful, transparent work could make a real difference for people living with trauma-related distress.