[robertrmorris]

Yea this is an interesting problem. The whole question of whether, when, or how to intercept someone who might be in trouble is really challenging and we’ve thought about this for many years (and had some missteps along the way and learned a lot on what works and what doesn’t).

Our system gently recommends our service to users right when they search and so the cost of a false positive is low (they can just ignore it or it might just seem like an unrelated PSA). Search is also great because we can vary the intensity of the keywords. For one of our partners, we’re now surfacing resources (in subtle ways) for lower risk searches like “depression.” It is super important to us to think about how we might help people upstream, before they reach a state of crisis.

For users flagged, we work well as a layer on top of CTL as our ux works for people across the entire spectrum of severity.