This is a serious project. Please find a licensed psychologist to partner with as you develop and test your app and prepare it for release.
Ask HN: I'm 15, won a grant to develop a suicide prevention app, what next?
71–80 of 161 posts
Re: Ask HN: I'm 15, won a grant to develop a suicide prevention app, what next?
#72I would suggest you to learn how to build the entire thing yourself. This is a great opportunity to get your hands dirty and understand the nitty-gritty of web development. Very useful in the long run!
Having said that, I am not sure about the time constraints you are working with. If the timeline is tight and you have never done this before, it's better to outsource it as opposed to building a sub-standard app yourself.
Re: Ask HN: I'm 15, won a grant to develop a suicide prevention app, what next?
#73Earlier quoted context omitted.
I find your reaction... odd? He's won a grant to develop a tool that has the potential to help out people with a real problem. Why should that disgust anyone?
Suggesting to anyone serious about suicide that an app will help is insulting. You have to be naive and unwilling to understand or a megalomaniac to think an app will help.
I have a painfully personal acquaintance with suicide. I agree that an app couldn't have done much for it after a certain point.
But what causes people to be suicidal in the first place? In my experience, feeling like they don't matter. Apps by themselves can't do anything about that feeling, yes.
But apps are used by people. And apps can help put you in touch with people who can change your life. Who can help you understand that you are important.
Apps can also put you in touch with yourself, and help you grasp your own context.
Perhaps this specific app will work, perhaps it won't, but writing off any and all apps seems a bit premature.
Re: Ask HN: I'm 15, won a grant to develop a suicide prevention app, what next?
#74Suicide prevention /app/? You don't stop suicide with an app. You're 15 and you have a grant for a gimmick. I'm 22 and I'm unemployed. I'm already depressed but this makes me angry, too, so I just made an account to let you know that this disgusts me. Empty words. At least your resume looks better with this.
It isn't clear exactly how the app will work, but my guess is it will establish an online support group for depression and encourage communication within the group. Even if it only reaches a tiny audience it could have a major impact on the people who use it. The app itself doesn't directly prevent suicide, but it gives communication tools to a community that does. Sounds like a great idea.
Something like /r/SuicideWatch? You don't really need an app to access that community. Just a web browser and a reddit account will do.
Re: Ask HN: I'm 15, won a grant to develop a suicide prevention app, what next?
#75Earlier quoted context omitted.
I find your reaction... odd? He's won a grant to develop a tool that has the potential to help out people with a real problem. Why should that disgust anyone?
Suggesting to anyone serious about suicide that an app will help is insulting. You have to be naive and unwilling to understand or a megalomaniac to think an app will help.
you are probably smarter than us
Re: Ask HN: I'm 15, won a grant to develop a suicide prevention app, what next?
#76As a developer who has struggled with depression, I really dig this.
I've got a lot of years doing backend work, and I'd be more than happy to help pro bono.
I personally would not get too hung up on the stack you use. Find something that will get you up and writing tests and building pages as quickly as possible.
Discussions about various stacks usually have to do with scaling and scaling usually is a problem after the prototype stage (which is the goal I'm guessing).
Up and coding.
I also agree that you should do the bulk of the work yourself. The knowledge you gain will be priceless, and in today's software development world, it is helpful for front-end guys to know what the backend guys do and vice-versa.
Certainly lean on people here for help and advice, but I wouldn't have someone do all the backend work for you.
Good luck to you!
Re: Ask HN: I'm 15, won a grant to develop a suicide prevention app, what next?
#77One other thing, no matter what, this is your project.
All the advice you get here, much of it good, and all the advice you will get throughout the project (especially if you open source it on github which I highly recommend) is for you to assimilate and then build into your opinion.
Listen to experienced dev's telling you why and why not a particular course will work, listen to people here on the research and the unintuitive nature of suicide, but in the end this grant was given because you seemed to have an insight or a gleam in your eye.
Trust that gleam, and tell us lot to go hang, if you think you are being pushed into something that in your informed opinion is not the best for the app.
And remember, Its not the only suicide prevention work out there, so the weight of the world is not on your shoulders - your job is to do a good job and be proud of the work. Let the world decide if thats going to solve its problems or not.
Good luck and all the best
Re: Ask HN: I'm 15, won a grant to develop a suicide prevention app, what next?
#78You are working on something important, and I was glad to read (and upvote) a lot of the other comments you received, and especially the offers for pro-bono help. One comment below suggested that you read the literature (I presume that means the literature about suicide prevention) and I would second that advice. To expand that advice a bit, I'll note that Martin E. P. Seligman and some other psychologists who have s…
I'm curious as to what you are saying here. Poor self esteem is healthier? People shouldn't have self esteem, positive or negative? Or they should, but we should ignore it?
Re: Ask HN: I'm 15, won a grant to develop a suicide prevention app, what next?
#79This is great. First off, congrats.
As others have mentioned, due to the sensitive nature of a project along these lines, I would strongly recommend finding a mentor in the psychology realm. You'll want to make sure that you carefully consider some of the functionality aspects of the app to make sure things won't be unnecessarily/accidentally harmful.
Re: Ask HN: I'm 15, won a grant to develop a suicide prevention app, what next?
#80You are working on something important, and I was glad to read (and upvote) a lot of the other comments you received, and especially the offers for pro-bono help. One comment below suggested that you read the literature (I presume that means the literature about suicide prevention) and I would second that advice. To expand that advice a bit, I'll note that Martin E. P. Seligman and some other psychologists who have s…
I second the advice to familiarize yourself with the literature, and would like to add a strong word of caution at the same time.
A disclaimer: I speak out of personal experience with this topic, and I did not read most of the comments that you've already received (sorry, wish I had the time).
So here's my word of caution:
You must be aware that you are intentionally brainwashing yourself into a biased worldview by reading all of these books on suicide prevention.
Every book on suicide prevention has the premise that suicide is "bad", after all, that is why the author wrote it, and that is what they are trying to prevent.
It does not matter a lick how scientific their "data points are", if the premise that they are starting out with is based on a biased point of view.
You will join their ranks if you don't keep this in mind.
Therefore, in addition to all of the literature on suicide prevention that you read, I strongly recommend reading literature that supports suicide.
Books that support suicide use a different word, but it is the same thing. These books employ the same linguistic trick that books attempting to prevent suicide use: they use words.
Words have unspoken meaning associated with them, that only exists ephemerally in the culture in which they are used. You may or may not find this hidden meaning in dictionaries.
These two words have in fact the exact same meaning, when it comes to the end act. Their meaning only slightly diverges when you take the cultural connotation and circumstances surrounding their use. Nevertheless, they really should be treated (by you) as synonyms, because the reasons that the people you are trying to prevent from killing themselves are usually the same in each case.
Word #1: Suicide
- the action of killing oneself intentionally:
- a course of action that is disastrously damaging to oneself
or one's own interests
- the painless killing of a patient suffering from an incurable
and painful disease or in an irreversible coma. The practice
is illegal in most countries.
Further, I will claim that unless you can see this point of view, your project will be an utter failure, and will not achieve any success beyond what existing measures have achieved.
To understand suicide, you have to understand wanting to kill yourself, and you cannot understand this intellectually, you have to have experienced it yourself (or have a great "emotional imagination", aka ability to empathize). How can you help anyone with a concept that you have no understanding of yourself? That is the road to failure.
Suicide is a very rational reaction to life. I've seen people call those who want to kill themselves "selfish", when it's clear that it is the other person who is selfish, and wants the person to stick around and suffer, only to spare themselves suffering.
So, to start you off, you may want to compliment your reading by familiarizing yourself with real suicide notes, before you even think about writing a single line of code. Here are some I found via some googling (I cannot vouch for their authenticity though):
http://theholydark.wordpress.com/2012/08/28/some-painfully-e... (references this page that is no longer online: https://web.archive.org/web/20130112214925/http://www.well.c... )