TL;DR: Modern technology has the potential to contribute significantly to the healing, resiliency, happiness and community of people exposed to adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) - and generally disrupt the way we think interpersonal support can be provided. In this article the author explains his vision and proposes to establish a foundation with the aim of developing open source and open content apps, knowledge and methods in pursuit of these goals.
The confluence of need and technology
In recent years, the area of mobile health technology has seen rapid growth across many first world countries, and for a number of reasons.
Faced with an ever increasing number of people needing treatment for mental health issues and diseases like stress, anxiety and depression, but with budgets that are often very constrained and don’t necessarily grow with demand, the traditional mental health sector is strained.
Meanwhile, smartphones and internet services have become almost omnipresent, and offered through these services are a myriad of specialised mental health smartphone apps and web applications offering everything from self-monitoring, mindfulness regimes and breathing exercises, to cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT).
And mobile health technology does work very well for a lot of people. From assisting in the treatment of veterans suffering from debilitating PTSD to helping the Joneses curb their anxiety or stress in their everyday life, it has proven to be a worthy addition to mental self-empowerment that should not be overlooked.
The apps (whether smartphone or internet-based) generally do so by means of offering psychoeducational readings, multimedia content (e.g. audio and video), psychological interventions (e.g. step-by-step instructions on how to handle certain situations, emotions and interactions), scheduled reminders, and self-monitoring (virtual diaries, questionnaires, etc.).
The possible benefits
It could almost sound like the plethora of possibilities offered would translate to having a therapist right there in your pocket. And, to some degree, that’s right.
In terms of being able to offer support to people in their everyday life, and in the situations and contexts where they need it the most, technology-mediated therapy and resiliency building tools hold great potential.
I would, however, personally rather think of mental health technology as being able to provide you with a context-relevant, well-informed, supportive sidekick. Because, as with all personal development, you have to do the hard work yourself - with all the help you can get.
Furthermore, with scalability and low cost being an inherent qualities of most software for smartphones and the web, many more people can get a supportive sidekick than would be possible just through face-to-face therapy.
Dare disrupt the field
Myself being an IT entrepreneur, consultant, and designer - with a noticeable ACE score - I got really interested in question of to which extent technology could be used to build mental resilience and new kinds of support networks.
This very much so because of my desire to put my own experience with dealing with ACEs into good work, somehow converting the negative experiences and personal victories with those into further use as future positives for myself and others.
Having done a lot of self-development work myself over the years, and knowing the time, effort and cost associated with this, I wanted to try and build such technology that would help people build knowledge, strength, and resiliency in themselves and others at a fraction of the time, effort and cost.
I started building a technology platform to support my vision of all this, and meanwhile did some consulting for non-profits and public sector organisations working within the field to connect with subject-matter experts, gain experience and bring concrete value.
Through my work, I met some really fantastic and committed people, and we did some great work in building software that every day helps people be more resilient.
But, I also quickly realised that I got disheartened by the amount of bureaucracy and red tape I encountered.
It appeared to me that many of the non-profits were fighting each other for financial resources (sometimes rather fiercely) from the same sources, and that they were sometimes almost too keen on launching high-profile mobile health projects as means to gain public interest and attract financial support, rather than on focusing on designing and realising the value that the software should bring the end users.
It also appeared to me that some of the public sector mental health institutions wanted the same kind of interest, and that they additionally suffered from a very strong form of “not invented here” bias: they each wanted to brand themselves as mobile health powerhouses, each more competent than the other, and therefore figured that they needed to build their own technology and interventions very much from scratch and according to their own budgets, often with narrow - and politically dictated - focus and constraints.
All in all, I guess that for any non-profit or public sector organisation, it’s obvious that you’ve got to work within the real politics of society, which can be tough, and I think this is basically what’s reflected in these examples.
However, for someone like me, who carries a cross-disciplinary vision with the aim to rethink how we as a society and individuals supports mental health, empowerment and resiliency, and how we minimise the effects negative social inheritance, I quickly felt the conflict between the conservatism of these organisations and my own desire to really disrupt this field in a socially responsible way.
Without an obvious way to make this happen without venture capital and thus having to focus very much on profit-making, and with my day job (being the CEO of an IT software process consultancy), getting steadily more busy, I decided to open source the components of the platform that I had built at the time (called moodkick.com), hoping to somehow find some kindred spirits to continue the development effort with in an open way. It was actually the first open source software of its kind.
In the meantime, life happened. I met a wonderful girl with whom I’m getting married, and my day-time job as CEO of a IT software consultancy got busier, and as a result, work on MoodKick slowed down.
Then, about a year and a half ago, I discovered the ACE Study, and at that moment I knew that the personal, mental, and social freedom I had been fighting for so hard in my own life, but which had been hard to make other people understand, primarily due to lack of a real language in society about the stuff, and an often negative discourse about mental health in the media, was now suddenly described, had a proper language and was backed by solid scientific evidence.
I felt like a person who, after having travelled the world in search for some deeper meaning and feeling of belonging, had finally met his kindred spirit, and through this meeting realised that the meaning had been with him all along.
Besides getting all happy about this, I started out the web site beatace.org to help me compile and digest the huge amounts of content I read, while hopefully eventually also making it easier for others to delve into the subject.
How we can ❤️ the ACEs away
What I found to be extremely meaningful to me is a vision that we as a society can and should do much better in offering ways of letting people heal their mental trauma and build resiliency across a lifetime, and that doing this could, in fact, prove to be one of our civilisation’s finest and most important developments. And with a lot of positive repercussions all over society.
Therefore, it is my goal to establish an international foundation that develops knowledge, methods and technology, which helps people exposed to ACEs become more resilient while making it easier for them to give and get peer-based support across the world, healing their trauma, allowing them to live longer and better, assisting in stopping the transfer of negative social inheritance to their children, improving relationships, and enabling people to become even more proud of themselves and of the work they do to support themselves and each other.
I believe that the foundation should be non-profit, open source and open content, giving a wide range of organisations, professionals and individuals the possibility of contributing with knowledge, resources and support (and getting recognition for it), while ensuring that it can be used in many contexts and across technological platforms like smartphones, tablets, PCs - all around the world and localised to many languages and cultural differences.
I hope that my vision and project proposal will spark an interest, and I would love to discuss both with you. I need all the help I can get to make this foundation and technology reality, and hopefully help all of us beat those ACEs. ❤️
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