I co-founded Safe Space when I was working at my first job. I was personally struggling with mental health issues at the time, and I realized there was no platform that provided accessible and confidential mental health support in Southeast Asia. I wanted to create a platform that would help people get the mental health support they need. I also wanted to raise mental health awareness and combat the stigma surrounding mental health issues in Asia.

In 2017, I met my co-founder Anto & decided to create Safe Space together. We started working on the platform in our free time, and we launched the platform in 2018. We also did a lot of work to raise mental health awareness and combat the stigma surrounding mental health issues in Asia. We did talks & workshops at different places to raise awareness.

Me & my co-founder Antoinette Patterson

Challenges

One of the biggest challenges was onboarding counselors to the platform. They have never used a platform like this before & had some reservations in the beginning. We did a lot of training sessions to help them get comfortable with the platform. We also provided them with a physical space for them to meet the clients if necessary. As we understood from the process face-to-face counseling will be more effective than online counseling.

Counsellor training session

Another challenge was building the chat platform from scratch & making sure the data was secure. We built our MVP version first and looked into compliance & security upgrades. We looked into getting HIPAA compliance & ISO 27001 certification.

Results

Safe Space is still going strong to this day. We have helped over 1000+ people get the mental health support they need. We have also raised mental health awareness and combat the stigma surrounding mental health issues in Asia. We have been featured in multiple news outlets.

It was such a rewarding experience to be part of this project and I'm proud of what Safe Space has accomplished so far. I'm excited to see what the future holds for Safe Space.