JMIR Publications

ABSTRACT

Background:

Mental illness is important and common, and yet stigmatized and difficult to seek support and care for. One approach to coping with mental illness is through peer support, and one way to facilitate peer support is through technology. Human-centered technology design for mental health peer support is an area that merits further investigation.

Objective:

This study’s goal was to uncover how we might design digital mental health peer support systems and to outline a set of principles that future designers should consider as they embark on designing digital mental health peer support. By learning how existing systems are used by people in their daily life and by centering their experiences of these systems, we can better understand how to design mental health peer support technologies that foreground people’s needs.

Methods:

This article reports on an in-depth semi-structured interview study (N=13) with users of a digital mental health peer support platform called the Buddy Project. Data was analyzed using the constant comparative approach.

Results:

Buddies developed friendships with one another, leading them to become each other’s peer supporters in their respective journeys. Buddy Project’s design provided a sense of anonymity and separation from pre-existing ties, making it easier for buddies to disclose their struggles; yet buddies appreciated being able to browse each other’s social media pages prior to connecting. Buddy Project has an explicit mission to prevent suicide and demonstrates that across their online platforms, which helped reduce the stigma around mental health within the peer support space. Buddies were matched based on shared interests and identities. This choice aided in developing meaningful, compatible, and supportive relationships with buddies, where they felt seen and understood. Further, buddies were concerned that matching based on shared mental health diagnosis may lead to sharing unhealthy coping mechanisms as well as comparing oneself and one’s experiences’ severity to their buddies.

Conclusions:

The analysis shed light on desirable features of a digital mental health peer support system. Future digital mental health peer support designs could consider the following based on this study: 1) matching peers based on interests and identities that they self-identify with; 2) having an explicit mental health-related mission coupled with social media and other online presence that makes explicit that discussing mental health is safe within the peer support ecosystem; 3) not matching peers based on broad mental health diagnosis. But if diagnosis is important in a setting, such matching should account for illness severity and educate peers on how to provide support while avoiding suggesting unhelpful coping mechanisms; 4) allowing for some degree of anonymity and control over how peers present themselves to each other; and 5) providing relevant information and tools to potential peers to aid in deciding if they would like to embark on a relationship with their matched peer prior to connecting with them.