Acamunity

Inspiration

Jessica: I am currently a first year doctoral student and have struggled personally with anxiety and depression throughout my university career. I have also known the majority of my colleagues to suffer, sometimes severely, from mental health issues. There is robust scientific literature that establishes that poor mental health on university campuses is an epidemic, and yet resources for graduate students in particular are very limited. So the three of us wanted to find a way to improve our own mental health as well as the mental health of others, in the hope that we could create more supportive environments. This is particularly important because we are all a part of underrepresented groups, in fields that have poor gender diversity. We saw Acamunity as a way to solve this personally significant problem.

Melica: I am a first year master’s student in Computer Science and I recently had a paper accepted to a conference in the US. My visa application to the US was rejected just because I am Persian and I don’t get to present the paper I contributed so much to, while my friends get to go, present the paper, and leave me behind. I am not being credited for my work and I feel left out. And what’s worse is that I feel alone in facing this problem and have no one to turn to for sympathy. At some point I even thought of leaving this career because of how unfairly I was treated. But I need to hear from other people how it will be fine and how I can get over this and move on.

Stephanie: During my first year in doctoral studies I have witnessed first hand the high demands of academia. I have seen colleagues struggle with the “publish or perish” atmosphere that resonates in the culture. One such peer worked for years on research only to find that another group beat them to publication, leading them down a dark, suicidal path. With tenure-track jobs on the decline, poor support from advisors, discriminatory behaviour, high emphasis on perfectionism, and lack of work-life balance, the world of academia can be an isolating and depressing place. There needs to be a community wide support group to create a dialog, raise awareness of issues in academia, and demonstrate that members of the academic community are not alone.

There is a lack of mentors and leaders from underrepresented groups and this in turn perpetuates cycles of underrepresentation. This underrepresentation decreases diversity, and diversity is important because it encourages strong academic research. Our platform provides opportunities for graduate students, post doctoral researchers, and professors to anonymously connect to one another online; this enables users to forge unique relationships that may have otherwise not been possible. When supportive connections are made between academics, a community develops, and mental health is improved.

As of now, The University of Waterloo student health benefits only covers up to $400 for cost of psychologists per calendar year (5). Considering the fact that the recommended fee for psychologists is $225 per hour (4), the resources at hand are dramatically insufficient for the mental health needs of people in academia. It is well-known that members of the academic community tend to experience higher levels of stress (2). Half of PhD students experience psychological distress (1) and over a third of academics have common mental health disorders (5).

1. Work organization and mental health problems in PhD students (2017) “One in two PhD students experiences psychological distress; one in three is at risk of a common psychiatric disorder.” https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0048733317300422
2. Higher Stress. A survey of stress and well-being among staff in higher education (2013) “Academics experience higher stress than those in the wider population” http://www.ucu.org.uk/media/5911/Higher-stress-a-survey-of-stress-and-well-being-among-staff-in-higher-education-Jul-13/pdf/HE_stress_report_July_2013.pdf
3. Academia needs to recognize mental health issues early (2017 news article) https://www.universityaffairs.ca/opinion/the-black-hole/academia-needs-recognize-mental-health-issues-early/#comments
4. Guidelines for Fees and Billing Practices 2015 - The Ontario Psychological Association “The recommended hourly rate for 2015 is $225 per hour.“ http://www.psych.on.ca/OPA/media/Public/OPA%20Guidelines%20and%20Reviews/GUIDELINES-FOR-FEES-AND-BILLING-PRACTICES-FINAL.pdf?ext=.pdf
5. Understanding Mental Health in the Research Environment (2017) “About 37 per cent of academics have common mental health disorders, which is a high level compared with other occupational groups.” https://royalsociety.org/~/media/policy/topics/diversity-in-science/understanding-mental-health-in-the-research-environment.pdf

What it does

It provides a safe inclusive community for people in academia to discuss their issues with a focus on peer support. Users can post their concerns, anonymously (hiding even their usernames to avoid the need of creating throwaway accounts) if they choose, and upon doing so, their peers who have faced similar issues in the past are notified of the concern, to hopefully sympathize or provide guidance. The user can also access similar posts in the past by other peers, and this feature can be enhanced by incorporating location and showing similar experiences close to the user. The user can choose to make a put a “critical” flag for their post if they feel like they’re issue needs immediate attention.

The default ordering of the posts on the homepage are by most recent, and this can be changed to “needs response” to avoid isolation and encourage response, or to “by region”.

Our platform is unique to other platforms in part because it requires verification from educational institutions. So a user is required to provide an institution email in order to join the community. This acts as a means of keeping communities and conversations sufficiently focused. Another unique feature is that universities can use data available from Acamunity to better improve mental health services and initiatives on their campuses. Universities may be provided regional information about common tags and themes (for example, if there is a higher-than-normal instance of ‘Critical’ or ‘harassment’ tags in the region). Administrations can then take that information and respond by bolstering campus-wide support.

How we built it

Currently, Acamunity is storyboarded using Balsamiq. The underlying component of the site, the membership access and forums, would be built and maintained with the use of a secure relational database management system (RDBMS). Our preferred choice for this would be with mySQL in conjunction with PHP5 to providing both the interaction between the database and the website as well as real-time notifications alerts. The site would be built using HTML5 and CSS.

Our ordering functions for forum posts are by New, Critical (user tagged), Regional, and Needs Response. The latter two are novel orderings and are described as follows: Regional := Posts would be sorted first by the poster’s proximity to the user’s region and then by newest post. By ensuring a minimum size of a region, we would expand the region’s size to keep a regional feel without risking too small of a community size to lessen the feeling of isolation.
Needs Response := Posts would be sorted first by the minimum number of responses/comments and second by oldest post. This would help the online community to combat isolation in ensuring all posts get responded.

Similar posts would be determined by the use of word embeddings to encapture the post’s meanings and keyword analytics would be performed via term frequency to determine and count the commonly used terms in posts.

Challenges we ran into

Idea formation was particularly difficult but made much easier through brainstorming and mentoring. Staying productive for long periods of time in a short weekend! It was difficult to sometimes not have the requisite background for technical aspects of the project for implementation.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Addressing an important problem that has affected us personally. A simplistic and user-friendly interface. A beautiful logo. Providing a safe environment for users to talk about the issues they’re facing in academia. Encouraging peer support by notifying peers of experiences similar to theirs. Incorporating state-of-the-art technical tools (Google’s pre-trained Word2Vec model) to detect similarity between posts.

What we learned

Devastating statistics on mental health status of people in academia, and the lack of resources available. The important things to consider when choosing an idea to develop. Tools for easily creating a mockup of an application (Balsamiq) Technical feasibility of our idea and how to assess it. Use of machine learning models such as Google’s pre-trained Word2Vec model for detecting similarity between posts. The importance of pitching and presentation of the idea.

What's next for Acamunity

Building, deploying, and marketing to universities, as well as grassroots marketing to better reach a broad range of people.