Over the past few weeks, I started a mental health initiative on the FreeCompliments Community, utilizing the vigilance of several volunteering members to watch for posts that express some type of mental distress that requires communication – a use case where a quick, empathetic response is a practical and wonderful use case of social media.
We created the concept of mental health ambassadors and clarified the role of the community in addressing posts created by distressed users.
Now, I’d like to utilize a mechanism created by LeoFinance (now InLeo) to help broaden the scope of this initiative.
Community Support via Threads
It has come to my attention that we have a fair number of people who have expressed sadness, difficult days, etc. via Threads. It’s a rapid way for someone to express themselves without having to create an entire post. We can advantageously use this fact to keep an eye on such Threads and cumulatively pile on with words of support.
We’ll use our Mental Health Ambassadors, who happen to hang around Threads, to look for such posts. Once again, if anyone is interested in becoming one (see the first link posted above for the job description), we’re open to accept more people.
Using Threadcasts to Support the Mental Health Initiative
We’ll be posting a daily Threadcast with the #threadcast and #mentalhealthinitiative tags (exact text to be determined very soon), where our Mental Health Ambassadors can post links to any Threads that express mental health struggles. Similarly to posts, our Mental Health Ambassadors will be able to tag anyone who’s interested in helping within the threadcast so that they can join in and provide extra support.
For instance, let’s pretend that I started a Threadcast. One of our Mental Health Ambassadors is scrolling around and finds a Thread that shows someone struggling. They copy the link of that Thread and post it as a reply to / comment within the Threadcast, and tag the members (@) who have agreed to be part of this initiative. The aforementioned members then come into the Threadcast so they can find the link, click on the link, and reply to the person in distress.
The Threadcast can additionally be used to discuss strategies of addressing particular issues, difficult cases, outreach, and planning/organization. It is intended to be a living, breathing, ongoing project.
Eventually, we may be able to use Threadcasts as a central place to organize and discuss the initiative, as we’re currently using Discord. If Threadcasts can be designed to keep all discussions visible and accessible similarly to Discord, we would be able to keep the initiative all in one place, and Discord would be a place to perform outreach outside of Hive.
Guidelines to Help Address People in Need
Since this post might attract some new interested eyes, I will reiterate some salient points:
You can always ask me questions about the proper approach to situations if you’d like. Since every situation is different, there is no single proper answer. However, a key point to remember is to not be dismissive about the person’s concerns (i.e. don’t say, “don’t worry, this too shall pass” or something similarly generic that sounds like a feeble attempt to be positive without addressing the actual issue at hand).
Here are some useful guidelines which can help you.
However, you typically do not have to go to great lengths at the very beginning. Simply reaching out with a greeting and acknowledging someone’s difficulties can be a highly productive start in the process of helping them. This first step is sometimes the most significant one, and as such is the primary job of the mental health ambassador (or in this case, anyone who happens to be the first to respond to a post).
Finally, if you’re interested in becoming a Mental Health Ambassador, let me know and reach out in our Discord (link at the bottom of this post)!
What do you think of the idea of using Threadcasts to facilitate our mental health initiative? Are there any other ways that we can use our frontends’ mechanisms to find more people to help?
I would love to hear any and all opinions about these topics from everyone who is currently a member of FreeCompliments, since you’re all inaugural members! Anyone else who finds this page is also very welcome to voice their opinion. We’re all about free speech, and everyone’s experience has value.
More posts with further ideas incoming soon!
Disclaimer: FreeCompliments will be a beneficiary for this post, and I will attempt to boost it via Ecency points as well.
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Here’s a permanent invite link to the FreeCompliments Discord!
