Alice Hendy tragically lost her brother, Josh, on the 25th November 2020 from suicide. Josh was her only sibling, and sadly passed away too soon at just 21 years of age.
Alice’s day job involves working in IT and Cyber Security, with experience in working for global financial institutions and insurance firms in the city of London. After examining Josh’s phone and laptop following his death, Alice found that Josh had been researching techniques to take his own life via internet searches, suicide forums and video tutorials.
The content available online following a harmful online search is far too readily available and fails to provide enough of an intervention between a user searching for harmful content and the subsequent display of the search results.
To ensure more help and support is given to individuals in mental health crisis and searching for harmful content online, Alice set up R;pple Suicide Prevention. R;pple addresses the lack of intervention and instead provides an immediate, vibrant display on a user’s device once they have been flagged as searching for online content relating to self-harm or suicide.
R;pple is an online nudge technique which consists of a powerful message of hope, as well as providing a selection of mental health support resources in a range of different communicative options (call, text, webchat, self-help app, pocket resources). Through R;pple, an individual feeling despair and researching harmful content will be urged to instead seek mental health support they deserve and need in a way that works best for them.
We fully support R;pple’s mission and are pleased to have our StayAlive app included on their important tool.
To find out more about R;pple, click here.
