Sue Warnke saw classmates posting suicidal thoughts on Twitter in 9th grade and created Buddy Project, a peer-matching program that pairs people by age and shared interests. The goal is to reduce stigma and provide nonjudgmental support through connection.
Everyone has mental health. It's like physical health, like everyone has it. Mental health is just a huge part of my life, and I spend pretty much most of that time advocating for it. I was in 9th grade, and I was on Twitter and saw that 3 people I was following were thinking of suicide. And after like tweeting them and getting other people to tweet them, I just started like brainstorming, like how can we like solve this really persistent issue of teen suicide. That's really what sparked the idea for Buddy Project. So Buddy Project works by taking 2 people and pairing them together as buddies based on their mutual interests and their age. Mental health is so stigmatized that people don't have someone to just talk to about it. And just knowing that, like, you can have someone that is nonjudgmental will just, like, listen can be very validating. I'm really optimistic about the way the mental health movement is going. I definitely have seen a decrease in stigma. I mean, enough that I feel a cultural difference. And I feel like we're gonna keep going in that direction. And I feel like uniting over the things that we have in common is really important. And I feel like uniting on interests is just the most effective way to really find friends and find that Peer support.
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