MindFit

One in five Australians suffer from mental illness at some point in their lives. The most common of these are depression, anxiety and substance abuse disorders, but there are many more which often occur in combinations.

54% of people with mental illness do not seek treatment. Many reasons impact this statistic, mainly being the stigma around mental illness. However, there are also serious problems in detection and pinpointing the exact diagnosis.

Mental health problems can influence and affect many areas of people’s lives including financial strain - due to medical expenses for things like therapy, medication and treatment - poor performances in education, fewer job opportunities and increased risk of self-harm or suicide. This poor stigma and lack of education and awareness can influence the mental health of those who are suffering. They may not speak up, fearing judgement, not being accepted or even failing to be assisted. They may keep their mental health to themselves and not get the help they need to become better.

This project is designed to help make getting assistance easier for people. Whether it’s talking to someone in the community or a peer who will understand and help you, gaining access to professional help, or even exploring activities to improve awareness and education. It can also be showing people find their own value, helping to change a negative mindset into a positive one.

Getting help in accessing psychological treatment is not only more efficient, but also more effective by creating another pathway to improving your mental health. This is backed up by assisting in educating people and allowing them to spread awareness to help those around them seek assistance when needed.

We are developing an online-based platform to support mental health sufferers.

Our project aims to change the community’s attitude towards mental illness as ‘problematic’ or ‘negative’ by educating and improving the future of our minds and wellbeing.

Why we need your help:

With plenty of research, resources, maintenance and staff required to spread the word and help bring our project to fruition, we need your help to get this project off our drawing boards and onto your devices.

Any little bit helps. Once we have the funding, we can start reaching those in need that might be too scared to talk to others and those who are afraid to seek professional help in person. We’ll also be able to assist in educating the community more about mental health so that they can help and support others in the future. We can start helping people with your support.

Here’s a few powerful things you can do to help:

• Spread the word about our project! Share it with your peers and help spread awareness not only of our project, but to help the need for education and awareness about mental health.
  

• Make a pledge! The quicker we get the funds we need to make our project a reality, we can start helping people sooner! Any little bit helps!
  

• Give us your thoughts! Send us your suggestions about what our project can do to help!

Stretch Goals:

• Have 10 premium support members To help support our project and turn it into a reality, we have multiple levels of ways you can support us. While we would love any help you can give us, we have a level of pledging support called our ‘Premium Support Members’. This is a level of pledging that will help support us on a recurring basis (pledging any amount on a regular basis) similar to a subscription, this will result in getting premium access and rewards as a thank you for their continuous support.
  

• Expand to more countries! To start our project, we will focus on launching our project in Australia, helping provide as much support, education and resources as possible in our app.
  

• Expand to more devices/platforms At launch, we will release our project on the App Store and Google Play Store, before quickly working towards launching an interactive website.
  

• Have a successful social media following Prior to launch, we plan to be present on Facebook, Instagram and Pinterest with a goal to reach 2,500 followers per platform, including receiving 500 likes or more on our posts - both in the 6 months after launch.

Risks and Challenges Maintaining a positive and supportive community when active is critical, and something we view as a crucial element of our app.

Any posts that are negative, including bullying, harassment or ones which will not follow our community values and ethics are a potential issue that must be addressed and dealt with in a timely and respectful manner. This includes any comments, posts or the abuse/misuse of our community network.

To overcome and help prevent these situations from impacting our community members, we will implement a flag system for users to report any post or comment they find that violates any of our guidelines.

We will also have staff moderating posts on the platform to take down any post or comments which violate our community standards. We will also have a disciplinary system setup for difficult users who have reached a certain number of breaches. These may result in a variety of actions such as a written warning or a ban from posting any posts and comments whether that be temporary or permanent for the user.

While we hope our community is filled with nothing but love, compassion, kindness, support and positivity, we know we have a plan and system put in place to help maintain the values and ethics of our platform and protect our users.

Potential delays with our app launch could impact our relationships. This affects not only with our future users and supporters, but also with the professionals we hope to collaborate with through our app.

To overcome this, we have created a project design schedule for our team to follow, from app developers to marketing executives, to ensure our project remains on track for our predicted launch date.

Keeping on top of any bugs and issues which may affect our app is crucial for a successful launch, sustaining quality, accessibility and usability, and for our users to have the best experience possible whenever they use our app. This is why we have experienced app developers constantly working together with the five co-founders to improve and maintain the app, and to fix any issues as quickly as possible.