How RallyPoint is tackling mental health, and where we can use your help

[Pictured: Sample image of this new mental health help feature]

Bottom line up front: Mental health challenges continue to be a major problem in the broader military, veteran, family member, and caregiver community. Warfighting is hard. Training for it is hard. Returning from it is hard. And in many cases, life doesn’t get any easier afterwards.

Dealing with these issues on our own is difficult because of the stigma attached to addressing it, especially in the military where any signs of “weakness” can be a career killer. By ignoring the symptoms we see - both in ourselves and those around us - we cannot get help and will suffer in silence while we continue to lose our brothers and sisters.

From my many years as RallyPoint’s Community Manager, I’ve seen members from many backgrounds - veteran, service member, all branches and jobs - post about their struggles. Some were more obvious than others. Tragically, not all of those members are still with us or their families today.

I’ve often wondered: How can I do better? What role can RallyPoint play in this crisis?

Choosing not to say something when I didn’t have the right words filled me with guilt, but saying the wrong thing given my lack of training could have negative consequences. Since RallyPoint is not a mental health service provider and most of us who see signs of mental health risk factors are not mental health professionals, we’re taking the steps we can to make a difference with minimal risk to those we serve.

For years, we have been carefully exploring (https://rly.pt/3WkboqR) how we can help play a role as part of the solution instead of sitting on the sidelines. If you’ve seen others on RallyPoint publicly post and thought “that person could use some help”, you’ve likely seen our team jump into the discussion to share options for immediate help that our mental health experts have suggested. These interventions on publicly shared “cries for help” are a result of this exploration to date.

The next phase of how we plan to help our community reduce mental health stress will deploy additional technology tools for direct and peer-to-peer interventions. Since we’ve met a meaningful level of success with our existing efforts, you will start to see alerts on pages where public signs of mental distress risk may be present.

If our system thinks you may benefit from mental health resources based on what you’ve publicly shared with other RallyPoint members, we’ll share some options for you to get help immediately.

If you are viewing a page where someone else has publicly indicated they could use some help, you may see a digital prompt suggesting how you can react appropriately to help in a manner that minimizes the risk without adding to the stress.

The technology is a work in progress - based on your feedback, we’ll improve it and adapt over time - so please let us know if you see any of these new features at a time when you sense it does not hit the mark . We believe your real intelligence will always be better than any artificial intelligence we can develop, especially when dealing with such an important element of the RallyPoint experience.

To make this successful, we can’t do it alone. Let us know your feedback, including what you like, don’t like, or new ideas we should consider. Together, we look forward to helping our community improve our collective mental health one connection at a time.

For a more in depth interview with Dr. Matthew Nock about our work, check out his interview with Federal News Network: https://federalnewsnetwork.com/veterans-affairs/2023/10/a-promising-new-avenue-to-help-prevent-suicides-among-veterans/

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