Building Mental Health Exit Ramps: 5 Actions You Can Take in 10 Minutes

I’ve been working for 2 1/2 years on a system to provide non-medical care for people with emotional distress. I want it to be evidence based, peer provided, non-clinical, completely voluntary, cheap enough to pay for ourselves AND available nationwide and worldwide very soon. This is what I think our community needs, and after spending around 6000 hours working through the permutations with much of your online input, I think we’re just about there.

The Connect Power community, or whatever we eventually call it, will provide all of those needs, plus be fun as well. All I need between here and making it happen are some computer programmers. So, if you are reading this blog and know how to build websites and create computer games, join us at Startup Weekend on Sept 28 – 30. You are my new best friend.  If this is not you, here are five things you can do in the next ten minutes to be my second best friend.

1. Think about all the computer games you’ve played. What if we had a game like Farmville or Sims but instead of building imaginary farms, we got points for helping other people through adversity? Not just mental health adversity, but financial woes, employment needs, racisism, or transportation concerns? What if the highest point earners in our game could convert those points to money? Tell me in your comments below your experience with gaming or games. There’s nothing like competition and fun and social contact, and here’s a TED talk that shows the power of what we’ve got coming. Then we can take the step beyond existing games to make our program an income opportunity for our community.

2. Go to our Indiegogo campaign to build our community. It has a great set of videos and decriptions of our plans. Put some comments and likes on that campaign – it’s totally free to add comments. The more comments and buzz we have, the more likely that we’ll be chosen as a featured campaign for Indigogo’s front page.

3. You can also make a donation to our Indiegogo campaign, and unlike donating to a political party, you are guaranteed to get some great perks for your contributions. We only have 24 days left to raise the funding, but we can make it happen!

4. Share our campaign on your Facebook page, Twitter account or email it to 10 friends. Those of us that are psychiatric survivors all know that doctors are rich, right? Hooray, we love you! (Maybe.)

5. If you own a blog, learn how to make money off it! This is a great book about monetizing online communities. The author of this book is an angel investor who also works with a group of networked investors. He says that if I can sell 20 copies of his book by the end of this month, he’ll find me angel funding to the tune of about $260,000 once I get a business plan finalized. I know this is just a test of my enthusiasm and comittment, but I really loved the book, too, and you’ll find it very inspiring. Put my name in the comments section of your order form.

And if you need any more inspiring and fun and happiness for your day, here is a video of my falling off me mountain bike onto what would have been my nuts if I was a guy: