Web 3.0 and Mental Illness: Context

First, we explore context. What brings users to the web?

It could be that a family member is in the middle of a first psychosis. However, the family has no experience of the phenomenon, and hence, they do not know what the symptoms mean. They come to the web for research.

It could be a patient with schizophrenia being discharged from a psychiatric hospital who now needs a residential treatment facility. The family needs to find an appropriate solution.

The patient has finished residential treatment, and the family needs to decide what’s next.

Maybe the patient is doing quite well with medication and wants to go back to college. However, there needs to be a supervised living arrangement that can take care of administering medication and maintaining structure. Parents come to the portal looking for a community living arrangement close to the University of San Francisco where the student can stay for a few years while finishing college.

Each of these use cases, and many more, require well-thought-through solutions spanning content, community, commerce, vertical search, and personalization. Let’s look at some of those in some detail. Also, as a reference point, you can look at the web portal of National Association of Mental Illness (NAMI), which is a good proxy for what we are talking about. However, if you test some of the use cases we’re talking about, you’ll see where their system fails.

This segment is a part in the series : Web 3.0 and Mental Illness