SINGAPORE – Some things have changed for the better since our parents’ generation, and one of them is a greater acceptance of seeking help for mental health issues.

According to Singapore’s National Population Health Survey (2022), young people between the age of 18 to 29 are more willing to share about their struggles with mental health.

Nine out of 10 respondents said they were willing to tap on informal support networks such as friends, relatives, colleagues. Meanwhile, 6 out of 10 are willing to seek professional help.

But not everyone has the knowledge of the best place to turn to for help. That’s where Project Irene comes in.

Self-funded

The brainchild of 20-year-old Aedan Gan, who will be studying at university in 2025, Project Irene is a bot on messaging platform Telegram that aims to provide Singaporeans with a platform that supports mental health.

Self-initiated and self-funded, the bot is free to use. It works by linking users in Singapore to psychologists, counsellors and therapists that fit their particular mental health needs. 

The bot prompts the user to select from a list of options for why they’re seeking help. Then it will search through a database of accredited mental health professionals, to find those who specialize in the areas that will help that particular user the most.

Once the bot displays a list of suitable options, it also includes additional information such as the working hours, gender, session costs and other pertinent details for the user.

At a glance, the user seeking help can view the information they need to make a choice that best suits their budget and circumstances.

“This was inspired by my friends’ and my own difficulties in navigating Singapore’s mental health support system. There can be a lot of information and professionals listed online, and it can get pretty overwhelming having to manually scour through different websites to collate all this information. This is why I’ve designed my bot to do all the leg work!” Gan said.

It also includes an emergency command, which will display at one glance various helplines and resources available to people in Singapore, including 24 hour hotlines and WhatsApp chat services for general emotional support, suicide risk and domestic/sexual abuse or violence.

Since launching in October 2024, the bot has over 430 regular users, and helped to make over 2,000 user-therapist connections. 

Coping with stigma

The inspiration for Project Irene came from Gan’s own personal struggles.

At the age of 14, he was diagnosed with Generalized Anxiety Disorder and comorbid Insomnia due to his anxiety. This meant he would often get less than 3 hours of sleep a night, which impacted his studies. To make matters worse, teachers who did not fully understand his condition assumed that he was simply being lazy.

While Gan said it wasn’t their fault, he believes the real issue is the trouble he had with being upfront with his teachers about his conditions due to the stigma around mental illness in Singapore, especially in a competitive academic environment.

Gan is grateful for his school counsellor, who was supportive and understanding of his needs. He also went for private psychotherapy sessions, supported by his parents. However, he described his journey as “bumpy”, seeing four different therapists before feeling comfortable with the fifth one.

“This is a major motivation for me creating my bot, as I believe strong patient-therapist compatibility is absolutely crucial,” he said.

Use of OpenAI

An interesting feature of Project Irene is that it integrates OpenAI’s GPT 4o, to help anonymously match users to others going through similar situations. 

This way, users may chat for mutual support.

“I choose to integrate OpenAI’s ChatGPT into my bot because of its advanced natural language processing capabilities. ChatGPT allows my bot to understand and respond to user inputs in a conversational manner, making it more intuitive and user-friendly,” Gan said.

The bot asks a user to describe their struggles in 20 words, and are placed in a “waiting room” until they are matched with a person going through a situation with a similar emotional impact. Gan gave the example of two people, one receiving a cancer diagnosis and another losing a limb, both traumatic events.

The AI does the work to match up users, and to prevent misuse, messages between users are screened by the AI before being allowed through, with only text allowed. In order to use Open AI’s tech, Gan entered into a licensing agreement that ensures Project Irene adheres to ethical guidelines and privacy standards critical in handling personal health information. 

“This agreement allows me to utilize OpenAI’s technology while committing to the highest standards of user data protection and ethical interaction,” he said.

Gan shared that integrating AI into the bot presented a few challenges, mostly ensuring that the technology was able to handle sensitive topics with the required care. It’s still undergoing fine-tuning, and with more time and funding he hopes to integrate AI with all aspects of the bot.

“In the short-term, I hope to integrate ChatGPT’s functionality into all aspects of my bot, allowing it to communicate in a much more natural manner with users, though this would require significant external funding,” he said.

Donate function

Gan has partnered with eight local charities, including Samaritans of Singapore, Eagles Meditation and Counselling Centre, and the Singapore Association for Mental Health.

The bot has a donate function, which enables users to find out more information and donate to these worthwhile charities.

If the bot gains more Singaporean users, Gan hopes to apply for various grants offered by Singapore government agencies, which support such ventures.

Another partner, Over-the-Rainbow, a registered Singapore mental health

charity, will provide trained volunteer listeners to users of Project Irene who are interested, via the Avie Listeners service.

These partnerships, while still in their early stages, may hint at bigger things to come.

“Long-term, if my bot receives mainstream widespread adoption in Singapore, I hope to collaborate with mental health practitioners and charities in surrounding SEA countries, starting with Malaysia, to allow users from other countries to chat with my bot to find compatible therapists,” Gan said. – Rappler.com

Sulaiman Daud is a 2024 #FactsMatter fellow of Rappler. He is a writer and editor at Mothership, Singapore’s youth-focused digital news platform.