Jun 15, 2020
How can we use technology to stop suicide?
How can we leverage technology to encourage
vulnerability and connectivity to help people deal with difficult
times? We dig in to these ideas today with Be A Looper
Founder and CEO, Amanda Johnstone. Amanda and I met during a
mental health tech conference (Transformative Tech Conference) in
Palo Alto during November 2019. We had such a great
conversation about suicide prevention, mental health, tech, and
other stuff that I just had to ask her to come on and share her
insights with our friends.
Amanda is from Australia. She is a social impact technologist,
an inventor, an investor, a speaker an entrepreneur and has been
recognized globally for her efforts around suicide
prevention. Recently, she was awarded Time Magazine’s
Next Generation Leader award for 2019. Past winners
of this award include Greta Thunberg, Ariana Grande, The Weeknd and
others.
In this conversation we talk at length about the power of
vulnerability, connecting with others, and how we can do a better
job showing up in the world in a way where we encourage and promote
others to be vulnerable and open in order to both live well, and
manage through difficult times in their lives.
There are a number of ways to connect with Amanda
including on social media which will be linked in the show
notes.
You can connect with Amanda here: Personal Website, Be A Looper Website, Transhuman
Website, LinkedIn
Mentioned:
The Power of Vulnerability with Brene Brown (Ted Talk)
Download Be A Looper here: https://www.bealooper.com/downloadlooper
Time Magazine: Interview
with Amanda Johnstone on Innovating to Stop Suicide
HERE ARE SOME OF THE THINGS WE TALKED ABOUT:
- How can we use our mobile phone, the thing that is in our hand
every day, to bring us closer together? This is the question that
drove Amanda to build a social support platform to encourage
vulnerability and connectivity, called, Be A Looper.
- Be A Looper is a
circle of friends who care about you and check in, in a vulnerable
way on a daily basis. As someone struggles with their well-being,
or starts to feel distressed, then your circle is notified to
provide support.
- Amanda talks about how she has struggled to be authentic and
how she struggles to present herself in the media and in business
one way, but that in reality she feels another. She talks about how
she was sleeping on her friend’s couch, and her life was falling
apart, and at the same time she was presenting herself as a
successful entrepreneur. She needed to be real. She
needed to be authentic. She needed to check in with herself
and with others and she needed a way to do that. Her
solution, Be A Looper, provides a way for her to be real, even if
just briefly each day, in a way that helps her check in with
herself, and evaluate the narrative she’s putting out there and how
that’s impacting the ability of others to be authentic with her as
well.
- The science of how Be A Looper works is very interesting. See
below… (these descriptions can be found on the Be A Looper website
here):
Social Support - Be A Looper is driven by social
support, with the emphasis on reducing isolation by providing a
sense of safety and community. We know from Self-Determination
Theory that the concept of relatedness as a powerful need and
driver of behavior has been proven out in many settings. Allied to
this concept is the need to support autonomy and competence,
related to self-efficacy, all part of ways to prevent the onset of
helplessness, which is a driver of suicidal ideation.
Chain Diffusion - We also know that when
someone close has suicided, the barrier to suicide of persons close
to them weakens. Individual behaviors such as this can spread
across groups and cultures through a process called chain
diffusion. This occurs when an individual first learns a behavior
by experiencing someone else doing this, and this then serves as a
model through which they and others learn the behavior, and so on.
Relatedness in this way backfires, so modelling a more positive
approach to dealing with despair is crucial.
Self-efficacy - Outcomes in behavior change
to healthier options, as with all intrinsic drivers depend on a
sense of effectance, competence, self-efficacy, concepts all
related to Allbert Badura’s concept that the way we approach life’s
challenges is heavily influenced by our sense that the actions we
are about to undertake will achieve the desired outcome, the
opposite in a way to the sense of helplessness and hopelessness
that may accompany suicidal ideation. Scaffolding a sense of
efficacy, a sense that one swipe will alter the outcome, or similar
low-threshold action will change the present in favor of a more
definite future, has underpinned our Be A Looper approach. Choosing
a behavior in the here and now that will have the best outcome over
the temporal future, valuing this future over the now, is key to
our desire to save lives one trusted contact at a time.
Role Modelling Vulnerability - Observational
learning theory suggests that an individual’s environment,
cognition and related behavior all integrate and ultimately
determine how that individual functions, and ultimately
determine how that individual will function. Based on the above,
learning to express distress in a non-confronting way that supports
rescuing actions by others, can lower the barriers to communicating
distress by modelling it for others in a process of chain
diffusion.
- The science of how Be A Looper works is very interesting. See
below… (these descriptions can be found on the Be A Looper website
here).
- They are coming out with a version that allows a provider or
employer to provide this to their populations.
- They have several years of anonymized data that shows how
helpful this intervention has been with people who were in
distress.
- We spent a lot of time talking about vulnerability and how
important it is in reducing stigma, helping ourselves, helping
others, and creating connectivity.
Connect with the Stigma Podcast in the following
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Email
Connect with host Stephen Hays here: Stephen Hays Personal Website,
Twitter, LinkedIn,
What If Ventures (Mental Health
Venture Fund)