The Mental Health and Expression Project

STORY OF THE MHE PROJECT

Have you ever avoided a conversation because you couldn’t put your thoughts and feelings into words? Turns out, this is a common theme that many university students struggle with. As students ourselves, we have seen this first hand, and decided that HackCamp was the perfect opportunity to assist and educate students on the importance of communicating emotions in an efficient manner. These factors are the motivation behind The Mental Health and Expression Project (MHE, pronounced ME), with the goal to foster a more inclusive and comfortable environment for open communication to improve mental health in University life. The MHE Project will bring students one step closer to fulfilling their University journey with increased awareness of the inability for teens to fully express their feelings that may be an outlet for more severe consequences.

PROJECT SCOPE

In hopes of bridging the gap between mental health and expression, The MHE Project is an immersive application that allows users to maintain a daily journal, receive actionable items, and discover new ways to express emotions all in one place. We begin on the landing page; this is the start of the documentation journey. The user will be given a range of emotions, and should choose one that best describes what they are feeling. The user will then be invited to partake in an “Emotion Dump”-- a place to document feelings without fear of judgement. The application then introduces five expression templates users can use to help communicate their emotions. Users are then provided with multiple “Actionable Items” to help manage or maintain their feelings, these are all backed by research (Appendix A). Once this journey is complete, users will be given the opportunity to reflect on their experiences, comparing their emotions before and after the The MHE Project experience.

ACCOMPLISHMENTS

We incorporated calls to action for all emotions that aim to help alleviate or maintain different emotions. By providing action-based value to our software, users can form healthy habits and curate a more emotionally healthy lifestyle. Our team recognizes this function as a great accomplishment because it differentiates our software from other mental health platforms that provide helpful tips and words of encouragement without calls to action. From a technical perspective, members of our team were given the opportunity to learn and build how React works from scratch. It was a great opportunity to demonstrate Learning-On- The-Go. Our team is proud of the accomplishment as it shows great initiative, discipline, and self motivation.

BUILDING PROCESS

The fun facts and statistics in our “Actionable Items” section are all well-researched solutions that are beneficial to University students. Our solutions are quick and easy to follow, as well as actionable right away. Studies show that the top reasons why University students do not seek help is because it’s too time-consuming and students prefer to “deal with mental health concerns themselves” (Vidourek et al., 2014). The MHE Project mitigates both these issues as users get access to actionable tips as quickly as they need, and the platform allows users to manage their emotions on their own.

We used React to make the actual components that went into our front-end design, and utilized React Router to facilitate navigation between pages. We learnt technical tricks such as using useRef hooks to suppress state updates on the first render, using CSS to display elements when another element is hovered over, and using Flexbox to structure our pages.

CHALLENGES

Given that this was our first foray into any front-end framework, we found it somewhat difficult to pick up the structure/syntax of React - more specifically, we ran into some difficulty with using React Router to implement navigation between pages. However, we were able to accomplish our goals for this project with the help of Google and the mentors who were available!

WHAT'S NEXT FOR US?

The future of The MHE Project is bright, the application will advance in automated predictive functions using the cumulative user database to generate new expressions and calls to actions for each emotion. These functions will enhance the user interface and experience. Furthermore, our team plans to implement filters in identifying other demographics to further exemplify diversity, inclusivity, and accessibility by allowing users to apply their location, age, gender, and other considering factors.