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“Suddenly, we got to become therapists for each other”: Designing Peer Support Chats for Mental Health

Published: 21 April 2018 Publication History

Abstract

Talk therapy is a common, effective, and desirable form of mental health treatment. Yet, it is inaccessible to many people. Enabling peers to chat online using effective principles of talk therapy could help scale this form of mental health care. To understand how such chats could be designed, we conducted a two-week field experiment with 40 people experiencing mental illnesses comparing two types of online chats-chats guided by prompts, and unguided chats. Results show that anxiety was significantly reduced from pre-test to post-test. User feedback revealed that guided chats provided solutions to problems and new perspectives, and were perceived as "deep," while unguided chats offered personal connection on shared experiences and were experienced as "smooth." We contribute the design of an online guided chat tool and insights into the design of peer support chat systems that guide users to initiate, maintain, and reciprocate emotional support.

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    cover image ACM Conferences
    CHI '18: Proceedings of the 2018 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
    April 2018
    8489 pages
    ISBN:9781450356206
    DOI:10.1145/3173574
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    Published: 21 April 2018

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    1. behavioral interventions
    2. health
    3. mental health
    4. peer counseling
    5. peer support
    6. psychotherapy

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    • (2024)ComPeer: A Generative Conversational Agent for Proactive Peer SupportProceedings of the 37th Annual ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology10.1145/3654777.3676430(1-22)Online publication date: 13-Oct-2024
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