What area of New Blood are you suggesting this for?
This suggestion pertains to the entirety of the New Blood community.
What is your suggestion and how will it work?
Life is hard, that's just facts. And everyone finds their own way to cope with it. However, not everyone is able to be strong and keep it together, and often times turn to heartbreaking ways to 'escape' and/or leave it all behind. As a community, I think it's important that we all look out for one another in ways extending further than in-game. Where individuals can have a person/s to turn to when they are down, depressed or feel like giving up. It can save a life. I don't exactly know how it will work, whether it's some sort of support group or something like that. But the community should decide.
What are the advantages of your suggestion?
1. It can save a life.
2. This community is made up of people, without people, it wouldn't be a community. Hence, we need to protect the diversity in our community by ensuring the people within are happy and healthy individuals, in all spheres.
Thank you for your suggestion. I really like the sentiment behind the suggestion, supporting friends through a rough patch is an incredibly good virtue to hold (online and in real life). However, I'm not extremely confident everyone in the community has the qualifications to give proper counselling or genuine support for mental health (if we set up an official Discord channel/forum board). I agree that this community has, and always will be, a safe space for a lot of people but don't want to burden staff and players alike in a role like this without them having proper training (a psychology degree or whatnot).
For anyone reading this, if you are struggling with your emotions, there are websites and communities that focus completely on mental health. For example, 7Cups (a free, online counselling site) helped me through a tough patch in life last year.
Yeah this wouldn't work, it's a good intention behind the idea but it's better resorting to other places, or individuals you yourself trust within the community.
I love the idea of this, but as others have already mentioned, we are not professionals and are not trained to handle these situations. Of course, my PMs are always open if someone wants a chat and I'll be happy to redirect anyone to some useful resources.
That brings me on to my next point, I have been working on a Staying Safe Online topic to post on the forums. It's actually been something I've been planning on doing for a while but private issues have affected it. I can stretch out the topic to include useful resources for people who are depressed and need help. If anyone has any questions about it, or would like to drop me some useful resources. Let me know.
Hi King, as mentioned, unfortunately we as a community are just not equipped to deal in true mental health support. I hope that we as a community have built a nice friendly feeling, and a place where people feel open to enjoy themselves and take a break from things, but we are not trained in dealing with mental health situations and therefore would not feel comfortable with setting up an official channel/board/group for dealing with it, as it would be unfair on both those who run it and those who turn to it for help. However I am sure there are many of us who are willing to listen if people ever need to talk.
As yorkie has mentioned, there is a planned topic where some useful resources and links are planned to be shared. I'm going to decline this, as whilst mental health is extremely important, we just are not equipped to safely or fairly deal with it.