We speak to Emily Reynolds, author of A Beginner’s Guide To Losing Your Mind and the person behind @everydaycarebot

Text Anna Cafolla

do you need to make a doctor's appointment? make a doctor's appointment — practical self-care (@everydaycarebot) February 16, 2017

What was the initial idea behind the bot? Emily Reynolds: I originally got the idea from work I was already doing around self-care. I’ve just written a book about mental health, and the whole aim of that was similar – providing genuinely practical advice. As someone with mental health problems, I’ve often found the literature or discourse around it frustratingly out of touch – there’s misery memoirs and more academic textbooks and not much in-between. I’ve always tried to fill that gap a bit by giving people extremely practical and really honest advice, so that’s where my interest in basic self care came from. My interest in self-care is personal – I have bipolar disorder, so I often find it hard to look after myself. This manifests in really basic ways – I often can’t shower, I struggle to leave the house, I don’t eat well, I basically don’t look after myself at all. I’ve spent a long time searching for, reading and collating my own research on self care simply because I struggle so much with it. Much of what’s out there, similarly, is really not helpful – I’m not going to engage in exercise when I can’t even get out of bed, for example. With regards to actually creating the bot, I’d seen a few other self-care bots that send periodic reminds to look after yourself, but they were really vague and, in my mind, not particularly helpful for people with more severe problems. There’s definitely value for a lot of people in positive affirmations, but if you’re really struggling to cope then I think there needs to be a much more down to earth, back to basics approach. What is its primary aim? Emily Reynolds: Its mission is to actively improve people’s lives in a series of very, very small ways. I’m not expecting it to change people’s lives, but I hope by reminding people to make doctor’s appointments or deal with their bills or have a wash in the sink if they can’t manage a shower, I am making their day a little bit better. It's clear there's a serious lack of funding/attention for mental health services. How can the bot contribute to the positive? Emily Reynolds: The lack of funding in mental health at the moment can only be described as a crisis, I think. An offshoot of that is that people are trying desperately to tend to the absolutely gaping wounds of a decimated NHS. Activists, charities and community groups are trying – with limited resources of their own – to protect people with mental health problems. It’s amazing to see people come together – particularly when I talk to activists with a similarly political outlook on mental health – but the fact that they’re having to do this stuff is really, really worrying. Obviously having a Twitter bot send you a reminder to take your meds or wash your face isn’t going to plug the gaps in services that people really need, especially in a crisis – when someone’s psychotic, for example, it’s probably going to be close to useless. So if the bot does slightly help people who can’t get seen by a doctor or who can’t get the right diagnosis or have no formal therapeutic support network then I’m really pleased, but I wish that it was supplementary rather than a necessity.

go through your wardrobe and get rid of things you don't wear — practical self-care (@everydaycarebot) February 9, 2017

What has the response from other users been like? Emily Reynolds: I’m really pleased how useful people are finding it – people have tweeted me to tell me how useful they’ve been finding it, and the bot itself often gets replies and quote tweets from people saying it reminded them to take their medication or do something to make themselves feel safer or calmer. And how did you come up with its tweets? Emily Reynolds: It was a fairly simple process – I literally just thought of a list of around 100-150 things that help me when I’m finding it hard to function. I’d already made a personal list to remind me of what I could do when I’m depressed, so I stole a lot of the more universally applicable ones from there. I also took suggestions from friends who have chronic mental health problems.It was really important to me that I wasn’t tweeting things that people who were going through crises would find absolutely impossible, so I made sure that anything I tweeted was broken down into very small constituent parts and treated those separate parts accordingly. How much do you see the Internet as a positive or negative force on mental health? Going online and finding people who were also struggling was a really big thing for me – it took me 10 years to get a proper diagnosis and lots of negative experiences with healthcare professionals, so being able to go online and find a community of people who understood me – and, really importantly, believed me – was an incredibly important thing. There are obviously bad points: when I’m depressed I’m more likely to stay online and talk to strangers on Twitter than I am to talk to friends in real life or actually leave the house at all, and although it’s definitely comforting, I’m not sure how healthy it is. But on a wider level, I think the Internet is an amazing place for people to speak out about their mental health and to help one another, to gain a political and intersectional understanding of mental health outside of their own experiences.

if - AND ONLY IF - you feel stable enough, take time to block or mute triggering websites, people or phrases — practical self-care (@everydaycarebot) February 16, 2017

compile an emergency list - people or organisations to contact in a crisis. give it to someone close to you if you feel comfortable doing so — practical self-care (@everydaycarebot) February 6, 2017