Digital Becca

  • Samaritans Radar is about more than privacy

    Today the Samaritans launched a Twitter app designed, essentially, to help stop people in mental health crisis from slipping through the digital net. As the charity relies almost entirely on volunteers, and as suicide remains one of the UK’s biggest killers, I can certainly see why they might commission a project which monitors people’s tweets…

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  • How Mind managed to publish breaking news, from 2011

    Today a totally ridiculous coincidence happened, which I want to document somehow since it was fun to fix and will probably never happen again. What happened When Mind launched their new website back in November 2012, we hired a keen team of digital volunteers to set about the tedious task of migrating content from one…

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  • What’s wrong with irresponsible reporting around suicide

    Yesterday the world received the sad news that Robin Williams had taken his own life after struggling with addiction and depression for many years. Despite its prevalence, depression is still a much misunderstood illness and mental health organisations, along with their supporters, fight hard to ensure it has parity of esteem with physical health conditions.…

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  • Unpaid internships are still not OK

    I love my job, my paid, professional London job with its salary and other such luxuries that allow me to eat, pay my rent and keep the cat happy. But this doesn’t stop me keeping a casual eye on what else is out there, what kind of jobs are coming up in my area of…

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  • Three problems with the no makeup selfies for cancer

    A month on and there’s no denying the success, in fundraising terms, of the no makeup selfies for cancer. They raised millions for Cancer Research UK, the first to spot their potential and channel participants to a text giving account. The campaign ticked all the boxes for creating sharable content – it was image based,…

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  • Women need to be asking when International Men’s Day is too

    I saw a tweet on Saturday 8 March, International Women’s Day, which said “The least men can do on International Women’s Day is not to ask when International Men’s Day is.” In fact I think the very opposite is true. When I read the tweet I wanted to know exactly when International Men’s Day was,…

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  • 1 million conversations about mental health

    Today is 6th Feb, Time to Talk Day, which aims to spark an ambitious 1 million conversations across England and Wales about mental health. It doesn’t have to be anything profound, different, or life changing, just a simple conversation with someone you know, or even someone you don’t, about what this topic might mean to…

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  • Why we need advocacy

    As a first blog post, advocacy seems like an appropriate choice as it’s something I’ve strongly believed in for many years. Here’s why: Through no fault of its own, advocacy is one of those words which can’t help but sound a bit jargony. “Advocacy? Ah, so that’s like… What, exactly?” Advocacy means supporting someone to…

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