New features for Facebook users encourage private mental health conversations between friends

Facebook is looking serve as the facilitator of constructive, supportive mental health discussions between friends with today’s release of new features for the social media network and its private messaging service, Messenger.

Timed for release on the World Health Organization’s World Mental Health Day, the company has unveiled a “Let’s Talk” photo filter for Stories that invites peers struggling with mental health issues to privately reach out and confide in users with an open ear.

“Much important work has been done, and will continue to be done, on social media to de-stigmatize mental health, but our research tells us that some people will never be comfortable publicly sharing their story,” a Facebook spokesperson told MobiHealthNews in an email statement. “We learned that for many people, options like private messaging play a major role in helping to communicate about mental health. In fact, more than one-third of people surveyed say that private messaging makes it easier to talk about it.”