speaking as a user for a moment and not as an admin: i do think this is a good idea for the site and community as a whole, and i’d like for us to eventually be able to accommodate stuff like this.

but speaking as an admin and not a user: …the main issue (besides specificity) is that we’re grappling with how we can responsibly facilitate any kind of mental health-focused community on here. in our current position, i don’t think we’re capable of doing that, nor do i think we’ll be able to any time soon. this is why we balked on anything closer to that space than !neurodivergence@beehaw.org and !disability@beehaw.org, which we think mostly avoid what we’re worried about. (even then, we have three mods covering the first and i regularly keep special eye on the second.)

you’ve probably noticed that we really care about making sure our community and everything about it exists responsibly and ethically–and that also applies here. there are very real, immediate harms that can be caused by irresponsibly moderated health and mental health spaces and we don’t want that. but ensuring stuff like that doesn’t happen takes a lot of work and we’re just not in a place where we can do that work or promise we’ll get around to it.

while we also appreciate that people out there would volunteer to moderate such spaces, we’re also not in a place interpersonally where we can trust someone to watch over such a community. we’d ideally want legitimately qualified people to watch the space, and we just can’t promise that kind of thing. this obviously isn’t just a matter of pruning hate speech or getting correct information about how to take care of a plant–bad information in a (mental) health context can irreversibly harm or kill people. (and obviously there’s potential threats of violence, self-harm, and/or suicide that are really opened up to being expressed in such communities that must be handled with care. we’ve been fortunate to not deal with something like this yet.)

all this to say: this something we want to be able to have on the site, but i hope everyone can understand why this is a thing we’re not able to right now, and probably won’t for awhile.