The Facebook page is doing well. I put it up last May so that I would have a place to post my depression memes. I had several hundred of them made, and thought they might benefit others with depression. On my personal Facebook page, I have very very few 'friends,' and fight tooth and nail to keep it that way. So my depression memes really don't reach the right audience there. I do post them there first, but they do the most good on a page that appeals to those who have the illness the memes speak to--depression. I also have a few for Bipolar and Schizophrenia, and several about suicide and suicidal ideation. There are many that pertain to insomnia--a side effect of many mental health disorders. There are many memes that pertain to causal factors.
Here's one of my memes:
The memes all feature quotes by well-known people who have struggled with mental illness, including a few who have actually taken their own lives: Robin Williams, Sylvia Plath, David Foster Wallace, and Virginia Woolf. Rainbows and kittens and unicorns can only take you just so far in coping with depression. What is a bigger help is to hear what others have said--others who have gone through it and are going through it.
So I started a Facebook page, not thinking it would grow into anything, and now have over 500 following.
So I also started a discussion forum. That can be a nightmare, because discussion forums are extremely difficult to get off the ground. And right on time, I'm struggling to get it going. All I can do is stick it out, and hope enough people wander over and start posting somewhat regularly.
The main reason I started the discussion forum was because I've registered with several discussion forums geared toward mental health, and none of them really clicked with me. They were either poorly organized, unnecessarily large and complicated, poorly moderated and at the mercy of spammers, or the forums were moderated to prohibit any negative posts (failure of will, 'if you talk happy, you'll be happy') or any talk whatsoever about suicide (pretend like it doesn't exist and it will cease to exist.)
One forum was strictly for Christians with depression, and every post and comment had to be filtered through that. It amounted to 'failure of will' crossed with 'pray yourself happy,' and that was even less helpful. If you can't think yourself happy, you can't pray yourself happy. For one major reason or another, I found no forum that served its implied purpose.
Here's another one of my memes, just to give you a feel for them:
Sometimes, you feel like shit. That's reality. If you can't say that you feel like shit when you feel like shit, there's no help to be had. Feeling like shit is a component of all forms of mental illness, at one time or another, in one way or another. No one has ever been censored sane. It has never happened.
When you're using any hosting site for any kind of web page, you have to abide by that host's TOU. That's binding. For instance, if you start a discussion forum on proboards, you can set your own TOU for use of your forum, but your forum is also bound to proboards' TOU. That means you can't encourage suicide or discuss methods. Beyond that, you should still be able to discuss it. I found that all forums for depression were moderating discussion of suicide above and beyond the restrictions placed by the hosting site.
Why?
You need to talk through it. If you can't talk through it, it's never going to go away. In my opinion, there are no discussion forums out there currently where you can do that. That's why I started my own.
