Red Flags: A Mental Health Response Team

Summary:

Are we a community, or a competition?

Red Flags: A Mental Health Response Team

Totomo 18 Apr 2022 15:24

I recently read an article that deals openly with suicidal ideation, which was ostensibly also a strong auto-biographical account. The SCP Wiki can be a highly competitive place to write and a harder place to thrive. This is not a bad thing, but it is a thing. The Wiki has a long and unhealthy history of group-attributing unfavorable mental reactions to the culture as a “you” problem.

I don’t need to list examples of individuals who struggle with their mental health in relation to this site. It is disproportionate. This is not unique to unknown or “unsuccessful” authors either. Entire threads have been dedicated to this issue in the past, and more than once. The Wiki has been fortunate I think to not have a case of survivor guilt at this point. I also don’t need to factor in the added tumultuousness of adjacent social media drama to make my point.

The staff and community should recognize in an official capacity that this is a place that attracts dynamic, developing, complex, sensitive individuals who can broadcast the desire for more robust social support in coded ways. The medium is often a refuge for the marginal, disaffected person, and sometimes is utilized to be a sympathy selfie or a barely-disguised cry for help.

Given the mass of staff and sympathetic community members I know are here, I can’t believe a simple emotional response team hasn’t been organized. If I see a red flag, I have no clue who to turn to. This can’t be very ambitious, but should in part be made up of volunteers who are willing to reach out to site members who verbalize things like suicidal ideation, and who hit a consensus, arbitrary, but concerning-enough threshold to warrant the simplest of “Hey I saw this, I might be wrong, but I’m concerned, are you ok?” High-repute authors who are willing to decry the more mentally embattling qualities of the site should offer their influence and clout. It is nice for just any someone to say something like “upvotes shouldn’t be that important”, it’s a whole other thing coming from someone who has a lot of them.

We need to help these people find relief or outlets, if just that. This doesn’t have to be as distant as saying “might be good to see a therapist”. The forums team is perpetually strained, other staff members or authors too busy to help, which when you think about it is odd for a writing site. More stewardship in the form of emotional coaching around the act of writing and publishing is one possibility. There are also now a multitude of anomaly-centered writing projects similar to SCP around. Instead of being insular and hostile to these as if evil or competition, they should be used to rehabilitate those authors who, if they will admit it, are not yet at the stage of their self-confidence to write in the relative limelight. Face-in-the-crowd syndrome here can be real. Due to its popularity, cries for help can be quickly trampled in the high frequency of article influx and member engagement. Some go to unhealthy lengths to differentiate themselves, and this can increase with each unsuccessful attempt.

In short, we shouldn’t just stigmatize clear messages for help, if and when they come, as rare or complicated by ambiguity as the effort may be. All it takes is for someone to reach out. Maybe this is a field of dreams thing and if you simply build it, and have the stand-by opportunity available, they will come.

Can’t this be centralized in some way?

Re: Red Flags: A Mental Health Response Team

andromedaz 18 Apr 2022 15:50

We do have a content warning module, which is detailed here. If you feel that an article has triggering content for some users, you can suggest to the author to add it, or ask a staff member to do it.

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where we landing? not tilted! ッ

Re: Red Flags: A Mental Health Response Team

UncannyClown276 18 Apr 2022 16:44

i agree that the wiki has a problem of mentally/emotionally vulnerable people developing serious issues and/or having preexisting issues exacerbated due to their experiences here, but i'm not sure that staff centralization of support is the correct way to go about fixing this issue. i think there are a variety of factors at play here that a staff team focused on mental/emotional support of vulnerable users wouldn't really be able to do much about. i think a lot of it is the culture of places that people who are really into the wiki tend to frequent like scpd, which isn't something staff can really change with an organized effort. i also don't think there's much staff can do about the culture of upvotes on the wiki or the pattern that culture facilitates of people with preexisting issues attaching their sense of self-worth to wiki success, especially since that pattern is a big reason why upvote culture exists in the first place. if these things change, it's going to come from the people who participate in them the most: the active writers and readers.

it's also important to keep in mind that wiki staff people aren't professionals who are necessarily capable of providing adequate support for struggling people (like "emotional coaching"). the standard internet response of "seek professional help" that gets thrown out whenever somebody in a digital community expresses severe mental/emotional distress has become so common because most people online aren't comfortable providing the kind of help that a person in that situation really needs because they might make a mistake that a qualified professional wouldn't make with potentially catastrophic consequences.

in short, while i agree that there is a problem and that it's not just with the individuals who are having these mental health issues related to the wiki, i think any steps the community takes towards fixing that problem will start with normal users making an effort to shift the culture away from some of its more toxic elements, not any staff intervention. as for whether the users will do that or not, i have my doubts.

Staff Post- Open

fabledtiefling 18 Apr 2022 17:52

I would like to start off this post by saying that we as staff appreciate where your post is coming from. We can tell that this comes from a place of sincere care for other members of the community, and we respect that. Having said that, we cannot create a Mental Health Response Team, and we're going to explain why here.

+Details

It is grossly negligent to leave handling issues of severe mental health crises and place that emotional burden on people who lack the proper training or skills to respond to it. Several staff members are actually under legal obligations to not handle these crises due to their real life careers. The most that staff are able to actually due in response to the issues you mention is often linking to Suicide Hotlines and other online mental health resources.

Even if we had trained psychologists and psychiatrists on our team, they actually would not be able to handle these situations legally due to several laws surrounding patient confidentiality and consent to treatment.

I would also like to address a few of the more specific things you mention aside from legality.

The SCP Wiki can be a highly competitive place to write and a harder place to thrive.

This is not necessarily a true fact. How competitive the site is is entirely based on how individual users react to it. Upvotes only have the value that you give to them. While I can agree that it is easy to obsess over the numbers and feel lesser because of it, that doesn't mean that there is an innate competitive aspect of this site outside of actual competitions. For every user that you can find that feels the site is competitive, there are several others who don't feel that way, and those authors are all likely to be of varying success and skill level. This is a hobbyist writing site at the end of the day, and people do this out of a love for the craft.

If I see a red flag, I have no clue who to turn to.

The best thing that you can do in this situation realistically is to turn to proper, trained professionals and online helplines. There's little that staff could do in response to these situations that you as an individual can't, unfortunately. Staff simply is not and cannot be trained to respond to these situations.

High-repute authors who are willing to decry the more mentally embattling qualities of the site should offer their influence and clout.

This can only be voluntary per your own admission here. Staff cannot be expected to force authors with social credit on the site to decry mentally embattling site qualities. It isn't fair to those authors to have that expectation of them, especially when they may be going through their own personal issues.

The forums team is perpetually strained, other staff members or authors too busy to help, which when you think about it is odd for a writing site.

As a member of the forums team, I can admit that the strain is correct. That said, we actively encourage members of our team to practice self care in order to prevent burnout and to recognize their limits. This has proven successful so far- most of our existing strain simply comes from a need for more members. Again, however, this is a volunteer site. We cannot force other staff or authors to step in and help. Most of the other staff are busy with duties under their own purview, and once again staff simply cannot force other authors to step in and handle community aspects if they have no interest in doing so. Several authors simply wish to write, post, and leave, and that's totally fine! We cannot and should not place strain on individuals to interact more with the community if it is not within their interests to do so.

More stewardship in the form of emotional coaching around the act of writing and publishing is one possibility.

This site has a certain expectation for social and emotional maturity. It's why our age limit is what it is- it's to encourage a certain level of maturity from the userbase. There's only so much emotional and social coaching that can be done to reach the standards that the site sets- and it's largely why the feedback and greenlight process exists in the first place. It's to help coach new authors through the process and show them what to expect from developing and posting an idea to the site.

instead of being insular and hostile to these as if evil or competition, they should be used to rehabilitate those authors who, if they will admit it, are not yet at the stage of their self-confidence to write in the relative limelight.

On average, I only see this hostility towards these offsite community from newer or younger members of the community. Existing authors and older community members on average don't decry these communities as evil or as competition. That said, I don't actually see telling someone to go and write for an offsite community as a particularly smart move, since that innately implies that these communities have lower standards or are somehow lesser. After all, they'd only be getting users we deem as unable or unprepared to write for us. Telling users to read more articles and practice developing writing skills is fine, but I'm less inclined to say that directing them to specific offsite communities is a smart or even kind move.

Face-in-the-crowd syndrome here can be real.

One of the things I see you frequently mention here is with regards to popularity, notoriety, fame, etc. You mention limelight, attention, and so forth several times throughout your post. This is not an issue that staff can solve, especially not with a mental health response team. We have over 6000 SCP articles alone on this site, with a similarly impressive volume of tales and GoI formats all written by over 2000 distinct authors. This wiki is the single largest collaborative writing project in the world. As a result, the issues you point out regarding Face-in-the-crowd or feeling like you aren't getting attention are part and parcel for this type of setting. Users need to join the site recognizing that they may not become celebrities or breakaway hits. If numbers and attention are something that proves detrimental to someone's mental health, this is not the community for that person and it by nature cannot be. People going to unhealthy lengths to differentiate themselves is not a problem that staff or the community can address- it's a problem only that individual can recognize and address.

In short, we shouldn’t just stigmatize clear messages for help

Clear messages for help, as far as staff is currently aware, are not stigmatized. If you feel someone is being stigmatized for their cries for help, please reach out to staff to let us know and consider reaching out as an individual to help.

All it takes is for someone to reach out.

This is the most important thing you say- all it takes is one person. We as staff cannot make an official team to do this, rather users who feel compelled to should take the step to reach out to those they see are struggling. Staff cannot make a formal team for this. If a user sees someone struggling, they should offer support and mental health resources as appropriate.

Again, we can tell that this post comes from a place of good intention and care for the community. That said, this is not something that staff can formally create a team to respond to. Likewise several of the specific issues you mention come down to how individual users interact with the site and its community, and cannot be fixed on a wide scale by staff.

Re: Red Flags: A Mental Health Response Team

Brunzell 25 Apr 2022 08:10

You can also just ask the author how they are doing.