The Imperfect Experiment

A social creative community project

When I was in Vietnam, so many of our villages were being bombed. Along with my monastic brothers and sisters, I had to decide what to do. Should we continue to practice in our monasteries, or should we leave the meditation halls in order to help the people who were suffering under the bombs?

- Thich Nhat Hanh, Peace is Every Step (New York: Bantam Books, 1991), p. 91

The imperfect project stands strongly for the position that mental health and emotional support generally have been far too confined to the clinical office. While there is absolutely a role for professional helpers like therapists, psychologists, and counsellors of all stripes, we believe that much of what ails us can be healed through an understanding community that is willing to be vulnerable with and supportive of each other, and that there are not enough of these communities in our modern society.

Through the imperfect experiment, we propose building such a community by shifting member attention to a shared extrinsic goal. As we grow our community on Discord and begin the process of building the brand, we would like to test the potential benefits of utilizing the perspective and lived experience of those suffering from mental health challenges within the context of a social creative community project (SCCP). We believe that a successful SCCP could yield positive results for participants and contributors as well as for the greater community at large.

Typically, mental health support groups focus on teaching participants specific tools and strategies to cope with emotional stress and suffering. Imperfect, in contrast, offers members a mission-driven and creative vehicle to address some of the social issues that lead to unnecessary suffering (pressure to “stay positive,” eye-rolling at vulnerability in professional contexts, etc) in the first place. While we welcome open discussion about the daily mental health challenges of our users, we hope that directing energy towards a creative and social mission will be a complement to the more individualized work of “therapy” per se.

As part of the project, we hope to use best practices developed through the scientific community as they have evolved in support groups that have come before us (both on and offline). To this end, we will also attempt to monitor the impact of our users’ participation in the server, and include our observations transparently to users.

At the moment, we are considering the usefulness of what are called “qualitative” research methods. These stand in contrast to “quantitative” methods which use statistics, and are more appropriate for researchers with the resources of a grant or university. Qualitative research methods examine user engagement from the “internal” as opposed to externally observable perspective. It asks what the actual lived experience of people is, and might look for themes or patterns in the ways they describe that experience.

One subject we are interested in is the limited and pejorative ways in which mental health and difficult emotional experiences are talked about in our society in general, and how that creates the need for spaces like this one.

Questions we might ask are:

• How do users’ discussion of their own problems change over the course of their participation; Does their language become more nuanced and less judgmental?
• Are they able to respond more compassionately to others after receiving support from other participants?
• Are there ways to export this sort of supportive culture not just beyond the psychotherapy office/support group, but into the broader culture at large?
• Does a sense of mission in group participation lead to higher levels of empowerment, connection, and meaning?
• Can everyone benefit equally from participation in a creatively engaged support group, or is it more useful for people with a diagnosis?

Answers to these questions, subjective as they may be, could help us improve our own impact and perhaps contribute positively to the culture of online support groups in general. It is our intention to incorporate these learnings into our own community as well as make our findings public to help ensure an inclusive and safe virtual environment as we pave the way towards web3.

We hope you will consider participating and thank you for your support.

- imperfect, with help from a research advisor