Mental Health Platform
Reach was a concept for a platform for peer-to-peer mental health support within a university setting. My co-founders and I have been working hard since September to make our vision of a community without stigma a reality. I took charge of developing an app and as a team we worked to partner with organizations and school administration. Although this project is no longer making progress, I developed valuable experience with digital design.
Mental health on college campuses is a problem that most people will recognize, yet perpetually remains unaddressed. The specific issues we wanted to tackle were young adults transitioning into stressful environments. We wanted to bring about a community that can talk about mental health without stigma or judgment. Other solutions out there are personal mindfulness apps, which are missing the aspect of community, and therapy, which is the best solution for mental health support but can be inaccessible and have long waitlists. We wanted to focus on the gap of getting genuine support from your peers whenever you need it.
We interviewed students to learn about their experiences accessing mental health support. The solution we came up with was to match students to each other based on a shared struggle or emotion. We started off matching students ourselves and sent a flier (shown on the left) to various student groups. We set up calls between pairs of students based on feelings like anxiety, or situations like final exams. We got a lot of great feedback from these calls, and these students really valued this connection that was different than the support they currently had.
After the success of our initial prototype, we took it a step further by designing an app that will have the capacity of connecting many more students. and give the option of anonymity so students will feel more comfortable. I designed the initial app prototype and took the lead on further development.