Language shapes how we experience the world.
Lingwell brings that understanding into a guided conversation platform that helps people explore, organize, and articulate what matters to them.
What we are here to do.
Lingwell exists to reframe how we understand health and healing by recognizing language as the central tool for care. We experience the world through language: how we name, frame, and carry what happens to us becomes our reality. When we shape our words with care, we reshape our experience. Lingwell is designed to help people process, reframe, and respond to what life brings using tools rooted in language and grounded in well-being.
We envision a world where everyone has access to the mental clarity, emotional support, and communication tools they need when they need them. By harnessing the power of language, we aim to make mental health support radically more available, personal, and scalable.
We help individuals cultivate a sense of clarity, connection, and agency. Whether someone is navigating pain, stress, grief, or change, Lingwell meets them with the language they need to understand and shape their experience. We believe care should not depend on systems that are hard to access. It should begin with what is already within reach: our own voices.
The work came first.
For nearly two decades, beginning in 2009 with Writer Corps, a writing group for veterans returning from Iraq and Afghanistan, this work has grown into shelters, prisons, refugee and immigrant communities, cancer-support settings, and classrooms, places where understanding and communicating experience can carry real consequences.
Along the way it was studied and tested against research in language studies, cognitive linguistics, expressive writing, and medical humanities.
The technology caught up with the work.
For years, this work depended on a skilled guide being in the room. Generative AI made it possible to bring elements of that guided process into a form people can use privately, on their own time.
Through the Center for Linguistic Health, it became Lingwell, developed with Vanderbilt’s innovation ecosystem and NSF-supported commercialization programming.
Today, Lingwell is a working platform.
It is still developing through collaboration and real use.
Guided conversation
A private space to explore what matters, in your own words.
Participant-controlled summaries
A record of what emerged that belongs to the person who wrote it.
Tools for organizations
Ways to offer Lingwell to the people a program, practice, or team serves.
The People Behind Lingwell
Different backgrounds. A shared commitment to making meaningful support more accessible.
Lingwell brings together expertise in language, clinical psychology, technology, organizational leadership, and human-centered design.
Our work begins with how language shapes human experience: how people make sense of what happens to them, find words for difficult things, and gain greater clarity about their lives.
We build on that foundation through direct collaboration with clinicians, subject-matter specialists, and the people who will actually use Lingwell. In each setting, from healthcare and recovery to caregiving, we draw on the knowledge of people who understand those experiences firsthand, and we keep listening and learning from the communities Lingwell is meant to serve.
That keeps our development grounded in practice and responsive to real needs. It reflects how we believe meaningful technology should be built: with people, informed by expertise, continually refined through use, and measured by what it makes possible for them.
Matthew Leavitt Brown, PhD
Center for Linguistic HealthMatthew is a poet who taught writing and literature at universities for twenty years, many of them at Middle Tennessee State University. In 2009 he started Writer Corps there for veterans and military families. Over the next decade he founded programs for survivors of sexual trauma, for Latino/a students and community members, and for incarcerated writers at a Nashville facility.
His doctoral research asked what makes community writing programs work for people in the aftermath of trauma. The practical problem that followed was how to offer that kind of guided space to people who will never be in the room. Lingwell is his answer.
He has published several collections of poetry and created public art installations, and he is Poet Laureate of Murfreesboro, Tennessee.
Helping people find their words.
Explore Lingwell for yourself, or see how it might fit the people you serve.