CHI 2018 Honourable Mention CHI 2018, April 21–26, 2018, Montréal, QC, Canada “Suddenly, we got to become therapists for each other”: Designing Peer Support Chats for Mental Health Katie O’Leary,1 Stephen M. Schueller,2 Jacob O. Wobbrock,1 Wanda Pratt1 1The Information School | DUB Group 2Center for Behavioral Intervention Technologies University of Washington Northwestern University Seattle, Washington, USA 98195 Chicago, Illinois, USA 60611 {kathlo, wobbrock, wpratt}@uw.edu
[email protected] ABSTRACT One way to overcome these barriers is to provide training and Talk therapy is a common, effective, and desirable form of mentoring to build the capacity of peers with mental health mental health treatment. Yet, it is inaccessible to many challenges to support each other. Peer support is the people. Enabling peers to chat online using effective backbone for several well-established forms of mental health principles of talk therapy could help scale this form of mental services, such as Alcoholics Anonymous, crisis counseling, health care. To understand how such chats could be designed, and telephone support lines. This peer-to-peer support can we conducted a two-week field experiment with 40 people take many forms, including peer-led and peer-run experiencing mental illnesses comparing two types of online organizations, and peer-support workers providing care and chats—chats guided by prompts, and unguided chats. Results support within traditional organizations and services [60,72]. show that anxiety was significantly reduced from pre-test to post-test. User feedback revealed that guided chats provided Most of this peer support has traditionally been face-to-face, solutions to problems and new perspectives, and were but is being transformed through online access.