Your Voice is a nonprofit organization, powered by Whisper, dedicated to raise mental health awareness by showcasing amazing people who are coping on a daily basis.

Mental Health Issues Should NOT Intimidate You!

The stigma associated with mental health is one of the greatest problems facing youth around the world. Historically, emotional issues have been suppressed, avoided, or simply dismissed by society. The problems that this stigma can create are innumerable. It’s often brought up in the media any time there’s a mass murder or a mentally ill individual has a violent outbreak, but the stigma inevitably lingers. Despite significant advances in the field of psychology, mental health treatment is often still considered taboo. Even though every person on earth deals with some form of emotional pain, we haven’t been good enough at discussing these issues and working to fix them.

Ending the Stigma Associated with Mental Illness

Technology, thankfully, has been a useful tool for catalyzing change. The Internet has allowed people to more easily find others going through the same difficult life situations as them, to share their stories and connect on a meaningful level. Your Voice is a nonprofit organization dedicated towards raising awareness about mental health, and it’s one of the most useful technological tools for allowing individuals to share stories, empathize and connect with each other.

A Platform for Young People to Share their Stories and Struggles

Your Voice is powered by Whisper, and it was inspired by the many anonymously-posted stories involving emotional and mental issues that founders Brad Brooks and Michael Heyword found on the platform that they had created. Brooks and Heyword understood that Whisper was undoubtedly helping individuals express their deepest secrets and work through them in some way, but they wanted to go one step further through the establishment of a nonprofit organization.

Your Voice operates on the principle that experiencing emotional pain can be an isolating experience, but it’s important to know that there are thousands of people experiencing a similar form of pain. Many of those individuals have worked through that pain, and Your Voice serves as a reminder that you’re not alone, and you can work through the things that are plaguing you as well.

Capture and Share Your Own Story Using your Webcam

The way Your Voice helps is by offering a compilation of user-uploaded videos in which people from around the world reveal their own story about their struggles with mental illness. There are no real requirements, other than the suggestion that videos be between 40 seconds and 5 minutes in length. There’s a huge diversity of faces and opinions on Your Voice — which, unlike Whisper, is not anonymous — and the fact that so many people are able to boldly discuss such sensitive issues is an important step towards ending the mental health stigma. It also accomplishes Your Voice’s goal of demonstrating how many emotional issues are experienced and ultimately worked through by people around the world.

Find Additional Resources to Help with Commonly-experienced Emotional Problems and Mental Issues

Your Voice also includes resources that explore specific mental health issues in further detail. Anxiety, depression, stress, body image, sexuality, suicide and sexual abuse all have dedicted pages on the Your Voice site. Each of these pages includes statistics about how often these problems and issues are found in young people, as well as the organizations and charities dedicated to helping people deal with them. Your Voice shows that the co-founders of Whisper care about the impact their creation has had on society, and it demonstrates a positive way to utilize technology to help end the unnecessary stigmas associated with mental health around the world.