MyCare Mental Health Network

Principal Investigators:
Ronojoy Chakrabarti - Mathematics
Robert Randolph - Sr. Associate Dean for Students (advisor)

Additional Investigators:
Johnny Chang, James Chen, Greg Gryzwa (Sloan), Lisa Hsu (EECS), Brandy Leung

Project Overview:

The concept of the MyCare Online Community resulted from the group's personal experiences helping friends at MIT with mental health-related crises and a collective desire to bring a novel technologically interactive approach to coping with such problems.

The goal of the project in the long run is to create a centralized repository of online crisis support knowledge, expertise, and tools that can be distributed to universities and other groups who may benefit from it. The project's first-year goal is to provide online crisis support resources to the MIT community

Description:

Information Services:
  1. Comprehensive Information: Comprehensive information concerning the topics supported. In the first release, depression and sexual assault will be supported at the MIT@myCare web site. It takes a great deal of time and effort to gather precise and useful information concerning mental health topics. We hope to be able to provide such a reliable and non-frustrating resource to users who seek concise, yet comprehensive, information concerning mental health subjects.

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  2. List of Resources: On the MIT@myCare web site, a list of resources available specific to the MIT community will be a great resource for those in need of support. Other universities will be able to customize this information when configuring their software packages.

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  3. FAQ: A listing of Frequently Asked Questions concerning certain mental health topics. However, the answers will be from a variety of resources including different psychologist and counselor perspectives. Users will also be able to profile a certain "voice" that is most helpful to them, and can filter the answers so that they view the answers from that resource first.

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  4. Methodology:A short, step-by-step, guide for attempting to deal with mental health issue. For example, in terms of sexual assault, there are a certain chain of actions that must be done to ensure the health and legal rights of the victim. This section will provide such guidelines of action.

 
Web-enabled Communication Services:
  1. Message boards (moderated):Message boards concerning different discussion threads. These messages can be posted anonymously or using a user's log-in name. These discussions will be moderated by credentialed users within the system to ensure that users do no abuse the message boards and that users do not provide any identifiable information about themselves or others.

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  2. Journals (partially moderated):Users will have the opportunity to record their thoughts and feelings in a completely anonymous, private and secure manner. If a user wishes to have a particular journal entry publicly shared, a credentialed user must authorize this so that users do not abuse the public journal section and so that they do not provide any identifiable information about themselves or others.

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  3. Secure chat:At this time, we hope to provide chat capabilities between users in need and correspondents who have experience in the mental health area. Further explorations in to peer-to-peer chat discussion will be done.

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  4. Email or message: Another possible mode of communication is to provide an email or asynchronous messaging system where the user can request information or help with a question, and replies will be sent by correspondents as information becomes available.
     
    In all of our products and services, we would like to maintain a psychologically appealing and easy-to-use user interface. It is important to maintain a non-threatening and non-frustrating web site in terms of navigation, content, and communication. The anonymity and privacy of our users must be maintained. So, we will be providing anonymous log-ins and encryption of any personal information that is communicated through the site. Other communication and transactions will be secured through a wide variety of technologies.
     

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