Opening a door to mental-health help online

Rob Morris, SM ’09, PhD ’15, didn’t know where to turn when he first felt symptoms of depression as a teenager: “I had no exposure to healthy coping strategies. I had no vocabulary for what was happening to me.” 

That experience, he says, has driven his work on Koko, a tech nonprofit that grew out of his PhD work at the MIT Media Lab and aims to “address youth mental health by reaching young people where they are.” And where they are is online—on TikTok, Snapchat, or Discord, or maybe chatting with an AI bot. 

In partnership with such platforms, Koko offers free mental-health interventions backed by research and the input of an external ethics advisory board. Its website lets young people in nearly 200 countries help themselves through self-guided tutorials and help each other by sharing brief, anonymous messages of support using applications such as WhatsApp, Discord, or Telegram. —Sara Shay

Read more at www.technologyreview.com/alumni-profiles.