In 2022, we tasked the Community Review Board with a review of our entire website, including our mission critical Mental Health Resources page. This review addressed our accountability to racial equity, inclusion, and justice in our work. The feedback ranged across a variety of issues, including relevance, timeliness, applicability outside of the US, and accessibility. They also identified some key new resources that were missing from our website. We took the lionshare of 2022 to conduct an entire revamp of the website based on the feedback we received from the board.
We’re nearly finished with these updates, and are very proud of how far we’ve come! The community review board also reviewed these changes, helping us make sure that we fixed them the right way.
Below are the key changes we’ve made, and the work we still have to do:
- General website updates
We updated the format of a number of pages to make them more professional and easy to navigate, and streamlined the top-line navigation to make it easier to find our resources. These include Industry Workshops & Consulting, Talks and Panels, Recent Press, AFK Rooms, Expert Content, FAQ, and Blog Posts.
We also optimized the website for mobile users.
This page required the most comprehensive redesign, as well as the addition of a number of new resources. First we updated our “how to find a therapist” resource with three country-specific guides (Australia, UK, and US – Canada coming soon), including an updated flowchart for the US. We added corresponding links to UK and Australia-specific mental health resources and updated our online harassment resources. We also created a major new section (and had the board review these resources as well): Streamer & Content Creator Resources! And we still have our “find a helpline” widget from ThroughLine, the largest verified network of mental health and crisis helplines in the world.
- Next Steps
Continue our work on the Mental Health Resources Page – we are in the process of writing a new resource explaining how the new 988 crisis line system in the US works, and updating both our culturally-specific therapeutic support list, and our online therapy resources. We’ll also be reviewing self-care apps and tools to add to the resource list. This work is never fully finished – new tools come online all the time, and we try to keep tabs on what’s exciting, what’s useful, and what might be best to avoid.
We’re working on updating everything we can on the website to meet accepted web accessibility standards. Finally, we continue to update older articles with more international resources, updated links, and new research; and make finding key information even more accessible.