I've raised £50000 to support the build of a life saving tool: R;pple Suicide Prevention following the death of my little brother.
Organised by R;pple Suicide Prevention
Story
I am raising money to fund the build of an innovative and life saving online tool designed to encourage users in crisis to utilise a range of mental health support services available to them.
On 25th November 2020, our lives changed forever. Our beloved son and brother Josh took his own life by suicide at just 21 years of age. Josh had been practising how to tie a noose using his headphone cable following significant online research and searching.
There are 1.2 million internet searches for ways to take your own life every month - Suicide Forum, 2018
Sadly, words, sentences, questions and phrases relating to self-harm and suicide are far too readily available online to aid individuals in taking their own life.
To provide a safer space online, Alice (Josh's sister) has set up R;pple. R;pple is an online monitoring tool which flags potentially harmful content and replaces it with a range of mental health support channels for users in crisis.
Harmful online search results can add a level of vulnerability to individuals by reinforcing their feelings, legitimising their thoughts and providing users with the ways and means to act on their contemplations.
We need your help to ensure we can build this tool and save thousands of lives from ending too soon.
R;pple displays support in a bold, visual way, and contains a message of hope as well as a range of mental health support services (helplines, text services, webchat facilities, self help tools) before any content relating to self-harm or suicide are displayed. Through this initiative, a user feeling despair and searching for distressing material online will be urged to instead seek the support they require in order to gain access to mental health support.
The R;pple page acts as an interception to encourage users to visit a mental health support page from one of our charity partners as an alternative to viewing harmful online results.
Alice's story can be accessed here .
The R;pple Suicide Prevention website can be found here.
