Being There: Tech Does Some Good

If you want to help people in crisis, you have to reach them where they are.

A new plan from Facebook and a group of mental health organizations aims to do just that.

On Wednesday, “Facebook announced it will integrate real-time suicide prevention tools into Facebook Live. It also said it will offer live-chat support from crisis support organizations such as the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline and the Crisis Text Line through Facebook Messenger, and make it easier to report suicide or self-injury. The most novel of the new tools: Facebook is testing artificial intelligence to identify warning signs of self-harm and suicide in Facebook posts and comments.”

Making these online services (such as the Crisis Text Line) more accessible for people with urgent needs is an invaluable tool. But I hope that the move by Facebook will also mark an important step towards removing the stigma around depression and anxiety.

In addition to connecting people in crisis with people who can help, maybe artificial intelligence and big data can, at long last, remind us of the commonality of these states of mind and of the shared pain often associated with the human condition.

This combination of technological and human services could ultimately be an example of social media’s often forgotten promise:

Its power to remind us that we’re not alone.

This item originally appeared in NextDraft: Real News Daily.