The work on our mental health initiative is still in its early stages, but we’re constantly making progress and developing it further, both in terms of reach, organization, efficiency, and utility. We’re developing a serious use case for this platform, and I do invite anyone who’s interested to join this initiative as it continues to grow. You’ll be a pioneer for something that’s not available anywhere else on the web.
Keep in mind that dealing with mental health can be very tricky: it’s essential that we find a balanced approach which minimizes risks and maximizes benefits. In case of doubt, it’s always better to err on the side of caution. This is why we must always be willing to learn.
How We Have been Developing the Mental Health Initiative
As promised in the prior post, we opened up an account for our Mental Health Ambassadors (MHA) to collectively use. That account is @fc-mentalhealth.
On that account, we’ve been posting specific cases that we’ve addressed. Once we talk to the person in distress, we write a small note about it using this account. Our formatting consists of identifying the thread / comment / post, identifying the MHA who found it, concisely writing the topic of the link, what we did to address it, and how we’ll follow up on it. Follow-ups are also addressed in a similar format.
This is an extremely brief version of documentation which I developed based on my own experience in writing patient notes – and I’ve done thousands of those! In our case, we’re still keeping it rather informal, but organized enough to have all essential information available. This helps keep our cases organized and presented in a more professional format which we can use to assess what we did correctly, how we can improve, and to keep up with the people on our case list.
Currently, I’ve done the majority of the documentation. There is going to be teaching involved in how to do this effectively. It’s also not fun work by any means, but is highly important.
Currently, if a MHA writes up the post, they earn 10% of the rewards for the post. We expect that the earnings will increase over time; the mechanisms for this (primarily HSBI) will be put into place in the near future. Additionally, I’ll be setting up a growing reward pool (most likely HBD) which will be split among the MHAs who write up these posts. These values will be small in the beginning, but over time will grow – and hopefully will someday turn into a lucrative position and job!
Mental Health Initiative Activity via Threadcasts
I’ll also post the following as examples of some days when we’ve been busier than average – and have successfully managed to levy a response as a group. I attribute this partly to the formatting of Threadcasts, where we are able to organize our efforts in a clear timeline, the active participation of individuals, and our collective communication.
@freecompliments/re-leothreads-2hmp2jgwy
@freecompliments/re-leothreads-2f7xnxtw1
@freecompliments/re-leothreads-uhqigvjb
@freecompliments/re-leothreads-2x5s9rfc2
Here’s an example where a post on the Threadcast helped me connect with an individual who requires long-term medical assistance. We’re going to keep in touch to see what can be arranged, but this is all thanks to @luchyl’s find (you can find her reply near the bottom, and then see my response within the post):
@freecompliments/re-leothreads-2m7keckt
Here’s an example of where a post described the direct impact that the group initiative had on the individual (he was not aware that we were working together, which is ok!):
Check out @ckole’s first reply in the threadcast and the replies of our group within the original post: @freecompliments/re-leothreads-29bu5wflb
Followed by the post written a few days later that espoused the impact of so many people coming to help: @ameh19/refreshed-and-cool
At this point, I can already say that by helping one person to such a degree, we’ve succeeded in our goal. Our use case has been fully realized. Being able to change one person’s world, even for a short period of time, is a gift that reverberates through time.
Now, that doesn’t mean that we’re done – on the contrary, this just gives us reason to keep learning and to keep building. We can increase our reach and our impact and help realize the full potential of this initiative. Let’s keep it going.
Upcoming Plans
Periodically, we’re going to continue posting examples of successful interventions when the opportunities arise so that we can continue learning how to approach individuals in the least harmful, most beneficial way possible.
We’re going to continue developing an organized way to have our mental health ambassadors address people in distress, and also post using the @fc-mentalhealth account. It’s difficult work which does require appropriate incentives, so we intend to start funding via HBD; hopefully, over time, the monthly dividends will pay out enough that these can be well-earning positions.
Once we establish a fully functional mental health initiative, where our mental health ambassadors are able to do the work without my intervention (except in special or dire circumstances), then I think we’ll be ready to bring the initiative out to the world, and invite people from outside of Hive to join us. This is how we’ll start an onboarding process – with a fully viable, valuable service!
Feedback for Improvement
We’ve received feedback from some of our mental health ambassadors on the difficult of using Threads for certain activities. It’s important to keep in mind that the interface is still in development, and is expected to have bugs, but at least from my personal experience, it has been improving substantially since I started using it a year ago.
That said, we can still all participate in bringing this initiative out there in many different ways: replying to the daily threadcasts from any frontend you wish to use; sharing the threadcasts; sharing posts made from @fc-mentalhealth; writing up posts about the initiative; sharing suggestions for the initiative; bringing in people from outside of Hive who may be interested, etc. The possibilities are endless!
I’d also like to hear the opinions of other people as how you think we can keep improving the initiative on our end. For an initiative that’s based purely on human interaction, we appreciate all human interaction that will help us improve it!
Mental Health Ambassador Positions
As I’ve once said (paraphrasing myself!)… I’d rather have 365 days per year with zero need for this initiative, but we must always be ready to tackle the busy days. This idea will become more prominent as we increase our userbase.
Therefore, we’re always going to keep the position of the mental health ambassador open. It currently pays 5 HSBI per month if you’re working 1 day per week, 10 HSBI per month for 2 days per week, etc. The details are within the aforementioned post, plus posting your findings in the daily threadcast. As aforementioned, this also comes with additional rewards for posting using the @fc-mentalhealth account.
As the responsibility of the MHA position increases, I do expect that I’ll end up raising the associated pay. I still like to think I’m fair about these things, haha.
A Special Thank You
Shout-outs to our hardest working mental health ambassadors, who organized some meetings and are actively trying to onboard more people to join the initiative. Thank you for your consistent hard work @alessandrawhite @ganjafarmer @gregscloud. I’ll also give a shout-out to the new community they recently created, the Kindness Community (I promise you that they did not ask me to do this!).
Conclusion
The mental health initiative continues to make strides and an impact on some users. It’s still in its earliest stages, so there’s a lot of work left to do to make this an initiative that can be safely implemented on a larger scale. Let’s keep on learning and keep on building, and let’s make this world a better place.
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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