Xianghua(Sharon) Ding
University of Glasgow, Glasgow, Lanarkshire, United Kingdom
Peer-support has long been recognized as valuable for mental health, and has been commonly practiced online over the Internet. However, it is often reported that peer exchange online can have harmful effects, and there has been limited research on how to ensure its effectiveness and safety. Our ethnographic study of formalized mental health peer-support practices in Scotland uncovers the infrastructural work involved when setting up and managing conditions upon which peer-support can take place in an effective and safe way. We illustrate that peer-support for mental health is not only about bringing peers together to interact with each other, but also about ensuring availability, timeliness, proactive care, positivity and safety of peer-support as a service, by weaving various social, spatial and technical elements together and managing groups and their boundaries. Our findings illuminate the work behind these peer-support practices, and suggest design implications.
https://doi.org/10.1145/3544548.3580657
The ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (https://chi2023.acm.org/)