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Learning to Become a Volunteer Counselor: Lessons from a Peer-to-Peer Mental Health Community

Authors:

Robert E. KrautAuthors Info & Claims

Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction, Volume 6, Issue CSCW2

Article No.: 309, Pages 1 - 24

https://doi.org/10.1145/3555200

Published: 11 November 2022 Publication History

Abstract

Online peer-to-peer therapy sessions can be effective in improving people's mental well-being. However, online volunteer counselors may lack the expertise and necessary training to provide high-quality sessions, and these low-quality sessions may negatively impact volunteers' motivations as well as clients' well-being. This paper uses interviews with 20 senior online volunteer counselors to examine how they addressed challenges and acquired skills when volunteering in a large, mental-health support community - 7Cups.com. Although volunteers in this community received some training based on principles of active listening and motivational interviewing, results indicate that the training was insufficient and that volunteer counselors had to independently develop strategies to deal with specific challenges that they encountered in their volunteer work. Their strategies, however, might deviate from standard practice since they generally lacked systematic feedback from mentors or clients and, instead, relied on their personal experiences. Additionally, volunteer counselors reported having difficulty maintaining their professional boundaries with the clients. Even though training and support resources were available, they were underutilized. The results of this study have uncovered new design spaces for HCI practitioners and researchers, including social computing and artificial intelligence approaches that may provide better support to volunteer counselors in online mental health communities.

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Cited By

Yang WFang AShah RMathur YYang DZhu HKraut R(2024)What Makes Digital Support Effective? How Therapeutic Skills Affect Clinical Well-BeingProceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/36410298:CSCW1(1-29)Online publication date: 26-Apr-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3641029
Wang TShah HShah RWang YKraut RYang D(2023)Metrics for Peer Counseling: Triangulating Success Outcomes for Online Therapy PlatformsProceedings of the 2023 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3544548.3581372(1-17)Online publication date: 19-Apr-2023
https://doi.org/10.1145/3544548.3581372

Index Terms

Learning to Become a Volunteer Counselor: Lessons from a Peer-to-Peer Mental Health Community
1. Human-centered computing
  1. Human computer interaction (HCI)
    1. Empirical studies in HCI

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Published In

cover image Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction

Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction Volume 6, Issue CSCW2

CSCW

November 2022

8205 pages

EISSN:2573-0142

DOI:10.1145/3571154

Editor:
Jeff Nichols
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Copyright © 2022 Owner/Author.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution International 4.0 License.

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Association for Computing Machinery

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Published: 11 November 2022

Published in PACMHCI Volume 6, Issue CSCW2

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Cited By

Yang WFang AShah RMathur YYang DZhu HKraut R(2024)What Makes Digital Support Effective? How Therapeutic Skills Affect Clinical Well-BeingProceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/36410298:CSCW1(1-29)Online publication date: 26-Apr-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3641029
Wang TShah HShah RWang YKraut RYang D(2023)Metrics for Peer Counseling: Triangulating Success Outcomes for Online Therapy PlatformsProceedings of the 2023 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3544548.3581372(1-17)Online publication date: 19-Apr-2023
https://doi.org/10.1145/3544548.3581372

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