How can we better react to askers who are having a mental health crisis?

Question

We regularly get questions from people who describe symptoms of depression or anxiety. These are very common mental health problems. Some askers explicitly say they are depressed or anxious and it is disrupting their lives. Others only imply it.

Often, but not always, these questions are closed as unclear. This makes sense. It's hard to ask a good question when you are distressed.

Is there a way we can direct these askers to appropriate help? I think it's pretty clear this site is not the help these askers need.

Answer 1

First of all, we should not relax our rules for these questions out of pity or fearing to fuel the crisis by our rejection. When we cannot reasonably answer a question, the asker being in a crisis won’t change that – it will only make the damage done by answers worse. For example, consider questions closed for depending on individual factors due to making life decisions for the asker: Answers to such questions (other than: “it depends”) are dangerous because they suggest that we (random people on the Internet) can make such a decision. This is exacerbated if the asker is in a mental crisis, because they may be particularly responsive to these suggestions and the stakes are even higher.

However, we should not bluntly reject the asker, but acknowledge their pain, explain why we cannot answer their question (if any), and guide them to getting help, be it on our site or elsewhere. One interaction on this site that I am most proud of is turning a mess of a question by a suicidal asker into one that could be reopened and got answers that probably actually helped the asker.

Here is a lists of points to follow with such a question:

• Always flag for moderator attention. Even if no further action is required at the moment, this makes us moderators aware of the question so we can keep an eye on it and take swift action if necessary (e.g., when somebody posts a rude comment).

• Try to salvage the question: Is there anything in the question that we can answer? Or is there any valid question that straightforwardly arises from the asker’s situation? If yes, edit the question to focus on this and explain your edit in a comment.

• Otherwise, always flag or vote to close if necessary. If such questions are answered prematurely, it only makes it more difficult to sort out the mess. The earlier they are closed, the better.

• Leave comments to help the asker:

  • Show your compassion for their situation.
  • Explain why their question is not answerable in its current state (or explain your edits). If you voted to close as a duplicate, explain that if the duplicate does not help, they should edit their question to explain why.
  • Encourage them to seek professional help about their mental-health issues (unless they haven’t clearly indicated that they already did this). If the asker is suicidal, you can find some ready-to-use comments here.

• Make an extra effort to guide the asker to salvage their question:

  • Make it very clear which information is missing.
  • Think very hard about alternative valid questions the asker may have about their situation and suggest them.

• Follow the question so you can quickly respond to edits, potentially rude comments, etc. Remember that you can retract your close vote.

• If you see such a question make it to the hot network questions, raise a flag so moderators can undo this according to our policy.

Answer 2

I think it can be appropriate to give very generic suggestions when people seem to be disturbed in a manner that suggests they might benefit from seeing a therapist/counselor/psychologist. Even many people who have no long-term mental health issues can benefit from these sources of support; I think suggesting them is fine but be supportive rather than pushy.

What is, in my opinion, NOT APPROPRIATE is to offer your diagnoses. Don't say "you have depression, get help", don't diagnose someone's obsessive compulsive disorder, don't diagnose someone's personality disorder or the personality disorder of their professor or anyone else they are interacting with. It's never necessary to do so.

Answer 3

This is just one option: We could have a question

Where can I get help if I am feeling anxious or depressed?

This question could be used for closing questions that cannot be salvaged by marking them as duplicates.

Ordinarily this would be an off-topic question.

Answer 4

There has been considerable discussion about how to handle suicidal users, both on academia.SE and elsewhere on SE. Your question is about a mental health crisis rather than suicide, but I think Shog9's answer from the first link applies to both:

I hate to sound callous about this, but... This isn't a support group; y'all probably aren't trained to deal with the outpouring of grief and despair of someone you've never met [...] there's a decent chance that leaving a post like this around could end up just making things worse.

Shog9 then describes a (now widely-adopted) procedure [for suicidal users], which Strongbad summarized in the second link as:

(1) close with an appropriate message, (2) flag for mod attention, (3) mods (or users) call in CMs.

I would suggest using essentially the same workflow here:

• Close. If there is an on-topic, answerable question, we can answer the academia-related question while acknowledging that there are likely additional mental-health-related issues that need to be addressed but are beyond our expertise. If the mental health is the primary or only issue, we can close the question.
• Flag. For more serious issues, or if we are concerned that the post itself will lead to harm, flag for moderator attention. Mods will review and can lock, close, or delete the question as appropriate.
• Call in CMs. CMs are spread thin right now (and for the foreseeable future), so we would generally resort to this for only the most serious issues.