At the core of Innerworld is a culture deeply rooted in empathy, respect, and understanding—a sanctuary for those seeking solace in mental health discussions. Recognizing the need to build a mental health platform with a robust safety net to direct people in crisis to other resources, and prevent trolls or toxicity, we've spent the past five years creating our Five-Point Safety System. We developed this system with world renowned clinical psychologists to ensure it can support a safe and scalable mental health community.
This system is designed to nurture the very essence of our community, ensuring it remains a bastion of support for every user. Here's how our comprehensive approach to safety fosters a positive and non-toxic environment, allowing our users to engage, share, and grow in a space designed with their well-being in mind:
- Community Guidelines—The Foundation of Respect: Our community guidelines are the cornerstone of Innerworld's culture. They promote respect, empathy, and understanding by setting clear expectations around behavior. These guidelines are a reflection of our community’s commitment to doing no harm and fostering mutual respect.
- Guardians: Our guardians, equipped with specialized training and an effective toolkit, stand ready 24/7 to respond to any situation that arises. Their preparation is thorough, focusing on empathetic engagement and effective intervention strategies. This ensures that when a user needs support, our guardians are not just responding but truly understanding and addressing the heart of the issue.
- Therapist Supervision: While therapists do not directly provide intervention in Innerworld, their expertise is invaluable in overseeing our program. They provide supervision for our guardians and guides, imparting wisdom and ensuring that our support strategies are grounded in psychological evidence-based practice. This layer of oversight adds a depth of care and understanding to our safety system.
- Proactive AI Safety Net: Our AI system is designed to flag situations such as trolling, bullying, and crises. This advanced technology serves as an initial filter to surface interactions for our Guardians to review and act on if needed.
- A Safe Haven for Adults and Adolescents: Innerworld prioritizes age-appropriate support by maintaining separate environments for adults and adolescents. Adults enjoy focused discussions in a child-free zone, while teens engage in spaces tailored to their experiences, all under our vigilant safety system. This approach ensures relevant, safe support for every age group.
Frequently Asked Questions
How do your safety systems handle data from meetings?
Maintaining the privacy of meetings is of the utmost importance in Innerworld so that each of our users can feel comfortable sharing openly, without hesitation. To maintain maximum user privacy, our meetings are kept confidential and identities are kept anonymous. Although we are not therapy, we have adopted standard practices used by therapy training clinics for quality and research. In certain cases, anonymized meeting transcripts may be accessed by clinically trained professionals for research and quality purposes and if reviewed, identities are kept completely anonymous.
If things are said that indicate a person is in crisis or is trolling, bullying or causing harm, our AI-based system may alert a Guardian who can review and respond if needed (such as escalating to trained therapists, or intervening in the case of bullying or trolling), while always maintaining privacy and anonymity.
Although we specify these details in our Terms of Service and Privacy Policy, we take an additional step during the onboarding tutorial to directly inform all Innerworld users that “interactions may be monitored or recorded for quality and training purposes.”
Will I suddenly get banned for something I said in Innerworld?
We do not ban people for things such as swearing or saying something triggering. If someone does something that violates our Community Guidelines, we will provide feedback and have a conversation to give the person a chance to change their behaviors and continue to be a part of our community.
We believe in treating all of our users with respect, and the right to speak freely is important to fostering a welcoming environment, as long as that speech is not intentionally causing harm and abides by our Community Guidelines. The Innerworld community is welcoming and willing to listen to feedback, and if you ever have questions about what’s appropriate in Innerworld, our Community Guidelines are the right place to start.
In cases where users are harming or causing potential harm to others, through speech or other actions, our community management team will intervene, explaining the expected behaviors and rules, and then enforcing those rules when needed. If a user continues to engage in behaviors that go against our Community Guidelines, we may need to disable that user’s account. In these rare cases, every user has a chance to appeal the ban by recognizing what went wrong and how to prevent it in the future.
