Be Well: Mental Health for Students, by Students

Homepage with forum posts about student experiences
Submitting an anonymous forum post
Our chatbot
Using the chatbot to find a specific Duke resource

Track: Duke and College Students

Inspiration

While Duke has a plethora of resources for mental health, we often find it is hard to navigate them. It may be difficult to find information through Duke websites or simply just intimidating and overwhelming to reach out to these resources. We wanted to create a safe space for Duke students to feel comfortable utilizing the available mental health resources and to encourage discourse regarding students’ personal experiences with mental health, Duke resources, and more.

What it does

Our website has two primary features: a forum and a chatbot. Our forum operates similarly to a Reddit feed/a blog; students can post testimonials anonymously about experiences they’ve had using Duke mental health resources and provide advice. This way, students can read about how their peers were able to use these resources, or even learn which resources didn’t help them in certain situations. This is a resource created for students, by students, and we hope that this forum can be a safe space where students can talk about mental health and help each other face their challenges through common experiences. Our second primary feature is a chatbot, which efficiently redirects students to Duke mental health resources. Our chatbot prompts the user with “how are you feeling”, to which students can respond. Based on keywords in the student’s responses, we lead students to specific Duke resources or wellness practices. The chatbot clearly outlines the steps students have to take to make the experience less daunting. For example, if a student’s responses prompt the chatbot to suggest Blue Devils Care, the chatbot will provide clear steps to set up their account and make an appointment.

How we built it

We used ReactJS to build the forum website and implemented various React component libraries, including Grommet and Material UI. We utilized the IBM Watson Assistant API to build a chatbot, where we had to learn how to structure conversation flow and input conversation logic. We also used Figma to create mockups of what we wanted the UI of our website to look like before implementing it in CSS.

Challenges we ran into

The primary challenge that we ran into was that most of us had little to no experience with using React and developing websites from scratch. It was difficult to learn how to use React and build a website in under 24 hours. We also found that training the chatbot to respond effectively required immense manual testing that took up a lot of time.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

One thing we’re really proud of is developing a functional website without much experience in web development. Most of us had never used React before, so it was a great learning experience for us. It was also our first time creating a chatbot. Since most of us also had no experience with machine learning, it was really exciting to see the chatbot working. This project is something that we all feel really passionately about because it directly relates to struggles that we’ve had as Duke students and we feel proud to have created this space to potentially increase accessibility to mental health support. We believe that this chatbot will simplify the process for a lot of students who feel overwhelmed by the overly procedural nature of seeking help.

What we learned

In terms of coding, all of us became more familiar with React, JavaScript, HTML, and CSS. We learned a lot about what goes into developing websites. Additionally, through our research, we were able to learn more about Duke and the resources that are provided. We didn't know where to start with getting help at Duke and always felt like there was a barrier to reaching out. Creating this website helped us better understand how to navigate Duke resources and how we can help ourselves and our peers.

What's next for Be Well: Mental Health for Students, by Students

As Duke students who would have utilized this platform when we wanted to seek help, we hope to continue developing this platform to be as beneficial as possible. First, we hope to continue training our chatbot to accept a wider scope of inputs and produce specialized responses. One specialized response could be linking the student to all posts with a specific tag on the forum. We want to implement a Q&A feature on our forum posts to make the website more interactive and provide the community feel. Furthermore, we want to be able to flag posts for harmful content to protect the safety of students using the website. We also want to allow users to make accounts (with Anonymous nicknames) to have control over their posts. We understand that the topics they post about may be sensitive and we want to respect their rights to edit or delete posts from the forum.