SupportMe: A Mental Health Website and App for Teenagers

SupportMe

SupportMe is a non-profit that will inform teenagers about their mental health and to connect them with the professional resources they need via a website and app.
Support Me’s business model will deliver improved mental health outcomes and reductions in the cost of mental health care for teenagers.
The website and app will be structured to provided the following services:
Learn about the science of mental health, mental health disorders, teenage (peer) perspective, how to communicate, the reality of life with a disorder, and the root causes behind mental illness.
Cope with the things you've learned to understand not by diagnosis, but by symptoms.
Inspire yourself and others by sharing positive affirmations, pictures, in a safe place.
Connect to mental health professionals and facilities with directories by location.
Support your personal values, journal, and path to recovery.
The target is audience is teenagers looking for recovery, it is aimed at struggling teenagers looking for positivity, a creative environment, and resources to help aid them recover.

I'd like to explore the following colors:

Blues: Knowledge, trust, calm and honesty.
Let designers make suggestions:
Yellows: Energy, intellect, fun and youth.

Some background:

Support Me is a non-profit that educates teenagers about mental health and connects them with the professional resources they need via a website and app.

Support Me is based on dialectical behavior therapy, a behavioral psychotherapy developed in the 1980s by Dr. Marsha L. Linehan. Through therapeutic skills and exercises that help each individual balance their emotions and see the world as it is, such as mindfulness, accept, and opposite action, Linehan was successful in reducing suicide and self harming behavior.

Support Me’s business model will deliver improved mental health outcomes while reducing the cost of mental health care for teenagers. It will achieve these objectives by identifying teenagers who need urgent interventions and by providing personalized services to them to reduce suicide rates and improve the utilization of health care resources both short and long-term.

We want our branding to target teenagers but also to be credible. Therefore, a youthful appeal is important, but we don't want a juvenile approach lacking maturity.

Did you know that suicide is the second leading cause of death for teenagers and 90% had an underlying mental health disorder when they died? Yet, at least half of teenagers don't get access to the mental health services they need in order to prevent harmful behaviors and suicide.

The consequences of untreated teenage mental health disorders are severe. This is why we want the design to be easily accessible and appealing to teenagers, but also mature enough to be taken seriously by all stakeholders (including parents).

Modern, clean-cut. We've played with the ideas of blues, grays, and whites or blues, purples, pinks (sunrise colors). We want to be credible as a site advocating and talking about health, but we want to really appeal to our target market, teenagers. The feelings we want to invoke include feelings of safety but also inspiration. We want to not only defeat the stigma surrounding mental health, but rather redefine/define what mental health and mental health disorders really are. One other branding idea we have is: this is the first app that's not all about you, it's about the ones you love.
One central symbol that we would like to include is an abstract representation of a neuron. One idea is combining constellation/galaxy/stars with neurons.

We could use suggestions for call-to-actions. However, our main focus we would like to establish with this design is branding with fonts, colors, logo integration, personal anecdote integration, types of pictures - establishing the overall feel of the website. And how each page falls into place. The pages of the site we would like your designs for should go as follows (links are provided):

1. Home page
http://www.goodvibesandhealthyminds.com/
This page will be in a blog format, the title, the caption, and a button underneath the caption need to be included at the top of the page, and the rest of the page will contain multi-media blog posts that will be updated weekly. For the header photo, we like the idea of keeping a constellation theme, or potentially combining the space theme with neurons to create a sort of cosmic-neural explosion of that will contain the logo in the center.

2. Sample Definition page (Generalized Anxiety Disorder)
http://www.goodvibesandhealthyminds.com/gad.html

The format of this page will carry over to another dozen or so similar pages. These pages have three simple paragraphs text that each will need to paired with a header and photos (that we will produce and upload). These pages also need to have a header picture (the same picture may be used across very page) and a text header. The picture or graphic designed header will need to evoke the individuals capacity to learn or understand. We are thinking of something natural, like a sky with clouds, or something organic like vines.

3. DBT module home page (Emotional Regulation)
http://www.goodvibesandhealthyminds…ation.html
The format of this page will be applied to 3 other pages. This page needs a header, a short body of text directly under the header/title picture, and three buttons/ pictures to link to more specific pages. The three sections that this page provides links to can have a short description and header or they could do without them if their picture/button gives a good idea of what the page is about.

4. Sample success story (Sav's Story)
This page is currently set up as a blog in order to break up the large blocks of text. We know that the blog format is not the right way to format this, however, we are unsure of how to break up and add interest to this page (and other pages) that have nothing but large amounts (750-2000 words) of uninterrupted text. We are very open to whatever suggestion and design ideas that you might have.

5. Self Expression blog page
This page is currently blog format and it will be updated very frequently. The posts that will be found here will be different forms of creative self expression. Some of the posts will contain photography, visual/digital art, poetry/short stories, videos and audio files of covers of inspirational songs and original music.
This page needs a header and a short bit of text explaining the content of the posts. Another option instead of the blog format is to break up the posts into several different categories with buttons that link to more specific posts.