Learning to Become a Volunteer Counselor: Lessons from a Peer-to-Peer Mental Health Community

Online peer-to-peer therapy sessions can be effective in improving people's mental well-being. However, online volunteer counselors may lack the expertise and necessary training to provide high-quality sessions, and these low-quality sessions may negatively impact volunteers' motivations as well as clients' well-being. This paper uses interviews with 20 senior online volunteer counselors to examine how they addressed challenges and acquired skills when volunteering in a large, mental-health support community - 7Cups.com. Although volunteers in this community received some training based on principles of active listening and motivational interviewing, results indicate that the training was insufficient and that volunteer counselors had to independently develop strategies to deal with specific challenges that they encountered in their volunteer work. Their strategies, however, might deviate from standard practice since they generally lacked systematic feedback from mentors or clients and, instead, relied on their personal experiences. Additionally, volunteer counselors reported having difficulty maintaining their professional boundaries with the clients. Even though training and support resources were available, they were underutilized. The results of this study have uncovered new design spaces for HCI practitioners and researchers, including social computing and artificial intelligence approaches that may provide better support to volunteer counselors in online mental health communities.