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When adding mentalhelp to a server, it will introduce itself and its purpose. Additionally, saying "help" will make it ask you if you're ok!
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The main features of mentalhelp are within private messages with it. As you vent to it, it will identify keywords and use those to respond.
Inspiration
Our inspiration was our own experience with struggling with mental health and needing someone to talk to that is not among our immediate friends. We wanted to create a voice that could tell us and those like us the things we wish we could be told.
What it does
When you send a "help" in a Discord server that mentalhelp is in, it sends you a message asking you to privately message them. After that, pretty much any negative word or phrase in its' DMs will respond in a message trying to help or encourage you. Some of these responses include sending you the number of the UMD mental health center, cheering you up, and giving you some strategies to help overcome imposter syndrome.
How we built it
We repl.it so that we could code simultaneously in python. Kazu already knew how to make a Discord bot, so now the task was to find out how to get it to DM you and respond to you on a server. After we worked that out, we started putting data for how to respond to people and what people could say to the bot. We both have "vent" channels in our individual servers, so we gathered a lot of the key phrases from that, along with statements that came to mind to help with this project.
Challenges we ran into
Coming up with an idea that would help a lot of people was challenging at first, but then we came up with this! The Wi-Fi was sometimes a bit frustrating to work with, but we got through it.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We are proud that the bot can be used by people to make their days better!
What's next for mentalhelp
We want to be able to add a command that sends random cat gifs and other gifs to lift people up in the future. Additionally, some functionality that would inform users of different mental health issues that they may not have been aware of before was also something we considered, but were not able to implement.
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