Elliot Taylor has been working with young people for over a decade. When he started to notice that they were putting out signals of serious distress on social media, rather than scroll past these posts, he reached out.

Live For Tomorrow is now on a mission to prevent suicide on social media, and is the first and only organised human response system to crisis posts online. Elliot's philosophy is to meet young people where they are, and use social platforms as tools for good.

Topics include mental health, suicide prevention, empathy, content culture, attribution bias and more.

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Find Elliot on Twitter, and discover more about the incredible work of Live For Tomorrow. 

If this episode has brought up any feelings of distress, please find a list of New Zealand based support options below:

• Free call or text 1737 any time for support from a trained counsellor 

• Lifeline – 0800 543 354 (0800 LIFELINE) or free text 4357 (HELP)

• Suicide Crisis Helpline – 0508 828 865 (0508 TAUTOKO)

• Healthline – 0800 611 116

• Samaritans – 0800 726 666 

• Youthline – 0800 376 633, free text 234 or email talk@youthline.co.nz or online chat

Transcript:

{Introduction} Lucy O’Connor: Trigger warning! This episode of Selfie Reflective mentions depression, suicide and self-harm. 

Although evidence might suggest that I can build a website and run a digital platform, I can’t work out the air conditioning in my car. When it comes to the technologically advanced scale, I’m not sure where that leaves me. At the end of 2019 I was Marie Kondo’ing my Facebook groups and I discovered that I was a part of a group called Tech Start Ups Ecosystems, which is full of entrepreneurs, software developers and advisors. There’s Imposter Syndrome and then there’s just being an imposter. 

Because I was Marie Kondo’ing it was important that I checked to see if this page sparked joy, so I clicked on the Facebook group to see what I could find. As well as being an unreasonable amount of acronyms, there were a ton of posts that featured words like ‘accelerator, incubator, results driven,’ and ‘inbound,’ which suggested to me that this group is on some sort of space exploration mission. But one particular post stood out. 

It didn’t look or read like other posts. It didn’t have big space-agey words. The content wasn’t a mixed mash up of Mark Zuckerberg, Steve Jobs and Gary V. The post simply said this: Anyone have an Instagram not in use? I need accounts with history to rebrand and use for an online mental support service. 

My interest was piqued, read comments, here’s what I learnt. Elliot Taylor was the founder and executive director of an organisation called Live For Tomorrow, a project that’s on a mission to prevent suicide on social media. Live For Tomorrow reaches out to young people on Instagram when they are posting during times of distress. Live For Tomorrow is the first and only organised human response organisation that responds to crisis posts online. 

Until recently Live For Tomorrow were reaching out to 100 to 150 young people per week and young people is anyone between the ages of 12 and 24, but recent changes to Instagram slowed them down. The reason Elliot was looking for unused social accounts is because Instagram blocks the Live For Tomorrow accounts for reaching out to too many users. To keep the service going Elliot’s team required old, unused accounts that were less susceptible to being blocked by the platform. 

They are looking to work directly with Instagram and other social companies to help solve these issues. Because of the nature of social media, Live For Tomorrow has been able to support people of all backgrounds, ethnicities, religion, sexualities and lifestyles from all over the world. At the time of speaking to Elliot, Live For Tomorrow had reached out to 7,311 young people and had had 2,281 conversations. 

Whether you’re on the fence or not about social media, the fact is that this type of work wouldn’t be possible without the ability to discover, access and reach people at moments of distress on social media. And Live For Tomorrow is definitely leveraging the space for good. 

Elliot, thank you so much for being a guest on the Selfie Reflective podcast today. 

Elliot Taylor: You’re very welcome; it’s good to be here. 

Lucy: In your own words can you tell us a bit about your own background and also Live For Tomorrow? How long has it been around and what does it do?

Elliot: So I am a youth worker by trade, so I’ve been working with young people ever since I was one and have been a part of an organisation called Zeal for over a decade now. Live For Tomorrow has been around about half of that time and we initially started, basically doing more of like a kind of health promotion play on social media. So yeah, we had social media pages, we would create YouTube videos, we had a couple of things go viral and it was more of that kind of approach of trying to take positive mental health messaging and get them out to kind of as many people as possible. And then a few years into that I decided that wasn’t a good idea anymore, so then we changed. 

Lucy: Why was that not a good idea anymore? 

Elliot: I mean we were doing pretty well, like as far as kind of content creation in the mental health space, we had had an online kind of online photo challenge campaign that reached over a million globally. We did some music videos that won an award and had hundreds of thousands of viewers online. I guess what happened is I found myself becoming quite cynical about the ability for content, I guess media content to be able to make any sort of meaningful change in the life of a person struggling. 

And that probably initially just came from thinking about my own engagement with that content, that you know, here we were trying to create really positive mental health things and then I would kind of jump in my phone and scroll and I’d see some little positive mental health thing pop up on my feed and I’d watch maybe one minute of it and then keep scrolling. And then you know, look at some friend of mine who has just had a child and feel mildly envious and then keep scrolling. 

And then see someone else who is on holiday somewhere else in the world and feel mildly envious and you know, I guess I just, I felt  like in our snacking culture, that throwing more snacks out into the ether, regardless of how positive they might be, just wasn’t really making that much of a difference. I think there’s still a place for it, there are some orgs in the world that do that work exceptionally, but yeah, I got to the point where I decided, hmm, maybe that’s not really for us. 

Lucy: So Live For Tomorrow changed tact, so what does Live For Tomorrow do now, today? 

Elliot: The best way to summarise the change was really we went from marketing to care. So yeah, as opposed to creating content that we wanted to send out to as many people as possible, we moved to a care approach. And what happened there, as we were developing all this content, we also started coming across accounts online, initially on Tumblr actually of young people, often anonymous, pouring out their lives saying the types of things that it might take a counsellor six months to hear. 

And as a youth worker I kind of read that stuff and go, well, if this young person said this to my face I’d have to kind of drop everything, pull up a chair and listen. And so why are we not doing that online? And so yeah, we pivoted quite substantially to, yeah, a proactive help model where we seek out and support young people who are posting on social media in times of distress. 

Lucy: And you do that through the social media platforms themselves, how does that side of things work? How do you actually reach these people? 

Elliot: Yeah, so we do it on Instagram largely. We’re testing on some other platforms at the moment as well. The reason we started on Instagram is just based off some research, we discovered that that’s at that point in time where most young people were disclosing, the ability to be able to kind of have a main account and then [** 0.06.34] or a private, various kind of dark or grunge accounts that young people might use as well. 

So this is kind of where the young people were and where the content was and also the tools that exist within the app enabled us to be able to initiate that conversation. So tools like hashtags and DMs meant that we could actually find someone that was posting in distress, you know, in the last couple of minutes and reach out to them and start a conversation. So that was kind of the seed of the idea and then over the last three years we’ve, I guess, kind of expanded it out and refined it to what it looks like today. 

And so we’ve done research on the types of tags that young people might use when they’re posting a distress. Often things like ‘depressed, suicide’ or ‘worthless’ and we tap into the Instagram search function and then call in public posts based off those hashtags. And then we have our team that goes through and reviews those posts and finds users that we think might be needing some support and then reach out. 

So as far as data science and the abilities, the things like AI and machine learning, it’s actually quite simplistic, comparatively, but also that’s because of, like we’re not formally connected with Instagram in any sort of way at this point in time. So we can only really use what we can get our hands on. 

Lucy: So when you reach out to these kids, what is the conversation like? 

Elliot: It depends on the young person, of course. We reach out as a kind of human, as alongsider, as opposed to some kind of representative of an org. And you know say, hey, it looks like things are difficult for you at the moment; I’m here for a little bit if you want to vent. Invariably young people are thankful. So even if they don’t feel like they need to chat or want to chat, they’ll often be really grateful and say things like, “Wow, thank you so much, it’s really nice to know that there’s someone there,” or, “You guys are really doing amazing work.”

If the young person does want to chat, yes, sometimes they will just kind of start downloading. Sometimes there’ll be paragraph on paragraph on what’s going on for them and they’ll be telling you things they haven’t told anyone else. And yeah, sometimes it’ll be a bit more measured and they might feel a little bit unsure. Yeah, I guess the job of our crisis counsellors is to make that young person feel safe and supported, to feel well listened to. 

Yeah, and then to help that young person figure out what next might look like for them. And for that to come from the young person, you know, as well, like we’re real big into protecting young people’s agency and helping them self-determine. And the issues we talk with, you know, are kind of a whole range of things from mental health struggles, depression, anxiety, family issues, school issues, suicidality, self-harm, abuse. 

We were talking with a young person recently, somewhere in the States, I can’t quite remember, who was homeless and kind of staying in a hotel somewhere with their parents who were both quite heavy drug users and didn’t really have any support. Yeah, I mean that’s the thing that kind of brings, or centres me, or kind of brings me back into the work is kind of realising that this user, which is a very common tech speak, is actually a person. 

And these are the same young people that might walk through one of our organisations youth centres. It’s the same type of kid and so yeah, I have this little beautiful quiet moment where I can hopefully listen to them and make them feel like they have a human connection with someone else that cares about them. Yeah and for me, in that moment in time, yeah, like the social media is simply just a means to an end, like it’s just a tool for that, it’s just a way to be able to do that. 

Lucy (thinks aloud): These days if you search for a hashtag, like ‘depressed’ for example, a popup will appear that says, ‘posts with words or tags you’re searching for often encourage behaviour that can cause harm and even lead to death. If you’re going through something difficult, we’d like to help.’ You can then click the ‘get support’ link, which takes you to a website that gives you a few ideas for reaching out to a friend or professional, or gives you a few ways you can support yourself through this time. 

It may seem small, but I think that’s a hugely positive step for the Instagram platform as it demonstrates what Elliot said before, a level of care and also a level of responsibility. Sometimes just the smallest added layer of friction or awareness can be exactly what someone needs to get through a really difficult time. So, more of that good stuff please Instagram. 

When I was growing up and experiencing teenager angst and intense feelings of all the things, I took to a journal to hash out my feelings, to write poetry and short stories, anything to make it feel like the words and the feelings were getting out of me and onto paper. Nobody knows about this journal, at least I don’t think they do. Actually, I just told you all… I’m burning it! I wanted to chat to Elliot about the difference between journaling something in private and posting something incredibly personal and incredibly difficult on social media. 

Elliot (interview): Yeah, I think the first thing to acknowledge is, like you said, there’s a kind of creative act that when you’re journaling you’re processing some of those emotions and so social media is a new context just to be able to do that. But it’s also a context where you can put out that and potentially get a response. And so from conversations I’ve had with young people, posting online in times of distress sits in this kind of liminal space where you might feel like you don’t necessarily want to tell an adult in your life about what’s going on for you because you’re a little bit afraid about some of the distress depictions that they might take or the agency that might be removed from you. 

Which from what a lot of young people are experiencing distress, that does happen, or that is their experience. And then you may not necessarily want to reach out to your friends and start downloading to them because they may be feeling similar struggles to you and you don’t want to burden them with that. So posting online in distress is kind of like a middle ground where you can put it out there and maybe receive some validation or receive some response from others around what you’re going through. 

And there are huge communities on Instagram and other platforms where yeah, young people are doing just that and they gain both a lot of value from those and I think it’s important to acknowledge the health of that, that there is a degree of good peer support that takes place. But also at the same time, yeah, that there’s dangers associated and that a lot of these young people are like hunger beggars telling other hungry beggars where the food is. And so yeah, kind of getting help or meaningful help can be difficult. 

Lucy: In your experience are there certain demographics that seem to be more at risk or seem to be sharing these types of things on social media than others?

Elliot: In our experience the majority, well, not the majority, but a larger proportion of young people that we talk with are female and we talk to users in over 55 countries, so it’s kind of hard to say as far as narrowing down any sort of ethnic demographic. A lot of the young people we talk to and that we see post online, either haven’t had any sort of, I guess professional help with their mental health struggles, or the professional help that they have received hasn’t been meaningful or significant for them. 

So as an example, a Norwegian journalist that I’ve been having some conversations with has been doing some really thorough reporting on like a hidden Instagram network of young girls, all posting in crisis with over 15 suicides connected to this network. And yeah, a lot of those girls basically don’t feel like they have meaningful support elsewhere or that kind of that health system, the mental health system for young people hasn’t served them well. 

And so yeah, in a way if you don’t have support or if you haven’t had that meaningful help, you’re gonna keep looking for it and you’re gonna try and kind of find somewhere where at least you can feel a little bit at home and find some other people who have that experience like you do. 

Lucy: Alex Beattie is someone that I spoke to in an earlier podcast episode and he explained how difficult it is to prove empirically that there’s a direct link between things like anxiety and depression and social media, which seems crazy to me. But he explained that it’s such a massive, a billion dollar industry and if you think back to the cigarette industry and how long it took for them to prove that there were any health related concerns there, and they had to change their practice accordingly, he kind of said that we might be in a similar time period where those things can’t be proved and therefore there’s a real lack of responsibility. 

And people are just going, what the hell is going on (laughs). But in your experience with these young people, and in your opinion, do you think that there’s a direct link between being on social media and experiencing mental health issues? 

Elliot: I think yeah, as maybe Alex is touching on, like correlation doesn’t mean causation. So yeah, some research has shown that young people struggling with things like suicidality or self-harm spend more time online than other young people. That doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s the time online that’s causing them to struggle with their self-harm or suicidality. I think I’d probably take it a step back and not necessarily ask the question about social media, but I think if you simplify it and you just think about it from the perspective of peer groups and types of peers that you spend your time with. 

We know if you’re spending your time with a whole bunch of peers that aren’t necessarily making good decisions, that’s going to have a negative effect on you, it’s going to be difficult for you to sustain wellbeing. If you’re spending time with peers that are making good decisions, that’s really going to help you, I mean that’s, I guess, why youth development exists. 

I guess, yeah, we are a ways away from having empirical research that really unequivocally states that spending X amount of time online is going to affect your mental health in these kinds of ways. I don’t think it’s too much of a leap to say that there are certain activities online that will make a difference to you. At this point, yeah, like it’s difficult to say what those might be and I think that’s why the whole conversation at this point when we’re talking about issues like this, often end at a point of going like, well, then be self-reflective. 

Kind of like you have in your journey of going like, oh, well, what happened for me? How was this affecting me? What is it that I might need to change, yeah. 

Lucy: I mean that is such a difficult thing. I’m obviously a little bit older than these people that you’re speaking to. I got on social media at an older age because it didn’t exist 10 years ago and I struggle to get off social media, even not having any reason to be on social media anymore, any real reason. I still can’t stop scrolling. So I guess it’s really difficult to imagine a world where kids have the self-control to get off and stay off these incredibly alluring platforms that are specifically designed to hold our attention, to take up our time, to keep us clicking and liking. I mean what are your thoughts around that? 

Elliot: Yeah, you’re right, there’s things to kind of add into that conversation, say around brain development that teenagers, their brain is basically undergoing renovations. They are less thinking about the consequences of their actions, more feeling things and responding to the things they feel. And so yeah, it feels a little bit cruel in some senses that you have these very intelligent executives running massive social media companies who know how to manipulate the attention of young people. 

And then you’ve got the young person themselves. It’s kind of like, even though they might have the will, to some degree, they don’t quite have the way to move forward. And so I think it’s one of the major issues for us to try and figure out how to support young people with that. And we just really haven’t, we haven’t caught up. The problem is these platforms are at massive scale and so every young person is online. 

Meanwhile the kind of education or support or interventions that are developed just simply don’t meet the scale. I mean we still don’t even have, when it comes to say public education systems, you know, widespread robust education on these issues for young people. So it’s gonna be like a long, I think it’s gonna be like a long road for us to be able to make progress in this space. Yeah, I guess for the reason, part of the reason we’ve taken the approach we’ve taken is because we see the ability for, I guess, start-ups to be able to move fast and solve a problem as opposed to relying on government or education to solve it, or policy. 

So yeah, that’s kind of why we’ve taken the route we’ve taken. All those other approaches are important as well, but we kind of saw a problem and just wanted to get our hands dirty. 

Lucy: When I emailed you to ask if you’d be a guest on this podcast your response (laughs) went a little like this, I’d just like to read it out loud right now: Social media is a vital topic that my friends and colleagues will tell you I have a lot to say about. In short, I don’t give two F’s about it, but have spent the last five years trying to use it to achieve some degree of good. I battle daily with using such a flawed and loaded tool to try and help people. I’d really appreciate if you could unpack that statement a bit for us? 

Elliot: I’d probably start with that kind of word I used, that is ‘loaded.’ I guess to say that it’s loaded means that it has some inherent meaning, the tool itself, before you kind of place or map on some, any sort of content. The thinker that I harp back to on that stuff is a guy named Marshall McLuhan who was a comedic commentator in the 70s and he came out with the line like The Global Village and that kind of thing. 

When one of my favourite lines of his is ‘the medium is the message,’ and basically what he means is that how you say something or how you present something, like is what you’re saying. In a book of his, he gives an example of the light bulb and how we just think of the light bulb as a medium or tool, that it creates light. But actually the light bulb in itself is loaded in some ways because you think about when you go camping and you don’t have a light, how much that changes the social dynamic for you and your friends. 

How you maybe might go to bed earlier. Where for us, now having a light bulb, it’s transformed how all of us live our lives and so you know, that can be used for good, we can light an emergency room, so we can see deep into someone’s heart and fix their emergency problem. Or it can be used for bad and so the same is said of social media, I think, like what I would say the same of social media. 

It’s a loaded tool and because it’s loaded, it’s flawed, because it means that it’s really up to us as users and the companies behind us, like it’s up to people to figure out how we use that tool. The added complexity is, because it’s digital technology, it’s shifting at a pace that nothing has ever shifted before. If you think about how when you hop in a car, you put on a seatbelt to keep you safe and there’s a speed limit to make sure that you don’t injure anyway. 

Yeah, we’ve developed those rules and regulations over a long period of time because we understand that that’s important, but part of that is because yeah, we weren’t able to proliferate the world with automobiles and the amount of time that we’ve been able to proliferate the world with Facebook. And so I guess that means that the technology is always going to be in front of the thinking around wellbeing and whatever is associated to that. 

I think policy being a big one, as a lot of governments are talking about, it’s just always going to be in front. And so that means there’s a whole bunch of harm that happens that you then have to catch up with. Yeah, and I think that’s part of the added complexity, almost bad stuff happens before it will get better. 

Lucy: In your experience how has things like anxiety or depression or suicidal thoughts, how have these shifted over or since social media was introduced to the youth? You know, have you noticed any different trends or a different kind of proliferation or a different kind of presentation? Have you noticed anything shift as a direct result of social media? 

Elliot: Yeah, I would probably also have to say that I’m a millennial myself, so it’s not like I have some objective view of this, like it’s totally subjective just based on my own experience and what I perceive. But yeah, a lot has shifted. I think social media is afforded the ability for many voices to be able to be heard and because of that, I think it’s helped a greater understanding of mental health issues and as a result, maybe more empathy. 

But because of that, and reducing stigma, it means people feel more open to be able to talk about it and so it means that you’re more likely to see or hear from others in your life or anonymously who are struggling. The tools or some of the ways that people use the tools also seem to have a detrimental effect, at least like anecdotally. And I think that’s the important thing to acknowledge. 

I kind of try and stay abreast of a lot of the research in this space and yeah, it kind of depends the paper you read on how terrible social media might be at the minute. But at least anecdotally people have negative experiences, at least anecdotally you know, people follow a whole bunch of celebrities whose bodies don’t look like their own and then start feeling a kind of a burdensomeness around how they look. 

At least anecdotally I know that I scroll through my feed and I look at someone else whose life seems to be mildly better than mind at this juncture and then feel sad about it. I have these moments where I’m like kind of going through life and I realise I’m just feeling a little bit of kind of flat and a little bit kind of argh. But the funny thing is, I can’t place it and so I’ll go, why am I feeling a bit gross?

And then I kind of think back over the last five or 10 minutes and go, what have I done? Then I realise, I was scrolling through Facebook and I saw something of someone who is holiday or getting married or something and I’ll kind of feel a little bit envious. And I just find it interesting that I’m feeling sad, but I’ve forgotten why (laughs). I think that’s, it’s a really common experience. 

We’re all consuming so much content, yeah, that it’s like hard for us to even have a reference point for where some of our feelings are coming from. We’re inherently social beings, all our interactions with people are, it’s media, so it’s mediated and so we’re not getting the full picture. So something is kind of put inside the frame and then something sits outside the frame. The problem is that we then make our decisions about others and ourselves based on what is inside the frame. 

And so I think this associated thought around this called attribution bias, which is like a psychological thought, yeah, which is basically like [eras 0.24.54] and thinking when we’re trying to evaluate our own or other people’s behaviour. So it’s like when you see someone online who has put up something about some, I don’t know, they’ve got a new job and how fantastic that is and you kind of go through this like sequence of assumptions of what their life looks like. 

Lucy: I can totally relate to this! (Laughs)

Elliot: And start attributing a whole bunch of, I guess biases of thinking that you just have no evidence base for. And so because stuff sits inside the frame, it sits outside the frame as well. And everyone is doing that all the time, thousands of times a day and so like no wonder we’re walking around and everyone is feeling so kind of wrought and tense because we’re all only seeing mediated parts of each other’s lives. 

And I don’t know if social media will ever get past that. I mean all of us, and I’m sure you’d be the same, would say, okay, we maybe need to be more transparent or honest online, but the problem is that, do we actually still do that in practice? For myself I just find myself kind of posting less. I often post less because I don’t want to make other people feel sad because I know I’m only going to post the nice things. 

And then I’m like, I don’t want to just post sad things because that’s not the full picture as well. I don’t know -

Lucy: That’s a huge big complex landscape, (laughter) we’re all just working it out. And I think it’s refreshing to hear you know, like us as adults compared to these young people that we really don’t know either. I think that’s a really honest take on the complexity of the time that we exist in and how we’re still not really sure, as you say, there’s going to be a lot of going back and picking up the pieces and thinking, what the hell were we doing before that, before this policy was in place, I think. 

Elliot: Yeah, but I guess the issue is that we’re still not even at a level of thinking to know what those policies should even be. And also, I guess one of the other difficult things is that I think, even though a lot of governments are talking about policy, like fundamentally some of it’s unrealistic. Because I think a lot of these policies, I think coming back to questions of freedom of speech. We have governments are wanting platforms to be able to moderate their content to a bit of degree, to stop there not being live streams of terrorist attacks or people posting about suicidality. 

But while I agree with that, you know, there’s harms to that content, it does start encroaching on freedom of speech to some degree and that’s what these platforms thrive on, is people to be able to have free speech. And you’re never going to be able to stop it. So much like we might have laws around say terrorism, having a law that says terrorism is not allowed to happen, or shouldn’t happen, doesn’t mean that terrorism doesn’t happen. 

And so I guess it’ll be very interesting to see in a decade or two, as I imagine, policy will come into play and there’ll be some consequence. I guess the prevalence of some of those harmful behaviours online, whether or not it’s lessened to any degree, it would be nice if it has, but I guess I’m a little bit cynical. 

Lucy: Well, we have that in common! (Laughter)

Elliot: Maybe this is defeatist, but maybe if we can kind of accept that we’re never going to reach perfection, there’s always going to be injustice, that there always is going to be people seeking their own interests as opposed to the interests of others. If we can accept that, then maybe we can also move on from simply fighting about it and start doing some good work. Which is, I guess, coming back to the work that we do, having conversations like this from time to time, but really my job, my fulltime job is actually to figure out how to do some good in this space, I care about people. 

Lucy: And as you say, if they are using social media, it’s like they haven’t sought help elsewhere, so in some ways, I guess, would these people be comfortable opening up otherwise and would you actually be able to have access to them? Yeah, obviously that’s a great thing about the space and the work that you’re doing in the space is that you do have that access and you do have that insight and whether or not, as you said, we can discuss the merits of the platform, but the fact is that maybe kids are treating it like a personal journal and maybe we will, in 10 years, understand far more about the psyche of our youth. 

Because you know, effectively we have the data, we have the information, we have the insights and we can maybe do something more positive with that. 

Elliot: Yeah and if they veer, like my thing has always been, if they veer, let’s change our shape to meet them where they’re most comfortable and support them in their place as opposed to having them have to change their shape to come and get help. Like if you’re struggling, that is hard, it’s really hard to access help, it takes a lot of bravery to be able to tell someone about that you’re scared. We all know that feeling. 

So if young people are online, I guess my thing is, regardless of the ethics of these tools, yeah, what might I be able to do to be able to make a difference to one young person in that space. 

Lucy: Recently I spoke to the 14 year old daughter of a work colleague and she started talking to me about some applications that are at her school where kids can send a message to someone that’s in a certain proximity and if they have the app, this message can be completely anonymous. And so obviously you can say really damaging or harmful things to someone and they’ll have no idea who is it, whether it’s your best friend or, you know, your frenemy across the room. 

And that kind of really shocked me because I obviously had no idea about what young people are experiencing because of technology. And I think that parents and teachers are feeling incredibly anxious and in a lot of ways quite powerless against this means. And I don’t believe that parents and teachers can be, or should be wholly responsible for a child’s wellbeing. There’s so much going on around that, but what advice would you give to parents and teachers, or people who are also in the space of youth wellbeing or worry about it? How would you suggest that they best support their kids through this digital age? 

Elliot: I would say three things. One, educate yourself, make sure that you understand the issues at play. Two, learn how to talk empathetically to people and then three, talk to them about it. The reason I say it in that order is because what you’ll commonly hear, like on a normal radio show you ask some expert in a space and what will they say. They’ll say, just talk to them about it, like that’s the end game, have a conversation, of course. 

However, it’s really important that when we have conversations that we’re kind of self-educated, that we have some idea of what we’re talking about and two, that we know how to have those conversations, like in an empathetic and supportive manner. And this is kind of one of our bug bears in Live For Tomorrow is that it’s all this kind of mental health marketing saying, ask your friend how they’re doing but no one is actually showing you how to have that conversation. So what if your friend says to you, you know, to be honest, I’m thinking about leaving my partner. 

There’s so many different ways you can respond to that and what’s your job? What’s your job there? There are skills that anyone can learn about how to have those conversations. So yeah, talk to people but make sure that you’re educated. Make sure that you know how to have those conversations. When I say ‘educate yourself,’ I kind of don’t mean that you have to become an expert in the space. 

But you need to have some basic understanding, some sort of reference point and then what you don’t know, you maintain a kind of inquisitive stance about. So if a young person is talking about a digital tool that they use that you don’t understand or you haven’t heard of, that’s okay to ask about that. The thing we want to help our young people do is to be able to think for themselves critically, reflect and make the decisions that are in line with their own personal values. 

That can be really hard, particularly for a parent to do because you’re so invested in the life of your child. But your teenager is naturally individuating. They are kind of moving away from their sense of identity being attached to you, and forming their own identity that is more actually attached to their peer group. And then hopefully, essentially, kind of has their own strength to it. 

And so what that means is that when you’re having these conversations, you don’t want to lambast a young person about your opinions about how bad this thing is. You want to evoke from them, and help them unpack their opinions about it. Yeah, we’re not there to decide for them. We’re there to help coach them to be able to navigate the world and if you’re having a conversation like that, you’re actually, you’re teaching them to be able to critically reflect and to be able to consider and to think about what their options might be, which means you’re building a healthy adult. 

Which means that when they’re into their 20s or whatever, you want them to be able to leave home and to be able to make the decisions for themselves. So yeah, start coaching them through, how do you help them to start making good decisions for themselves now and prepare them for the big world out there. I’m not advocating that we just let our schools run rampant and young people sit on their phones and just ask them how they feel about it. 

Yes, we need to have boundaries and our kind of stance in which we engage with young people, it’s one of support and understanding as opposed to one that’s just rules and boundaries. Part of our work as programme called Live For Tomorrow Guides where we support people to be able to learn how to have empathetic conversations. We all have mental health and so that means we’re all susceptible to times of distress and struggle. 

I sit on that continuum, you sit on that continuum and so yeah, if someone feels that, if today is difficult for you, yeah, then take the smallest, easiest step that you can to being able to connect with someone about that. It doesn’t have to be a big step. It doesn’t have to be everything right now. It’s just the smallest little step that you can take. 

Lucy: Wow, thank you for sharing that. Elliot, do you have any final remarks for our listeners today? 

Elliot: I think the thing that springs to mind is, this whole discussion really is about digital technology and its effect on us. And like I said earlier, you hear the word ‘users’ thrown around a lot, how many users does your app have or the engagement with these types of users or that type of thing. I think the thing we just have to remind ourselves of is that users are people. Anything we build, anything we interact with or anything we comment on or anything we see, yeah, they’re people. 

They’re as wonderful and complex and difficult as you are and so yeah, treat them with the same respect and care that you would hope that someone would treat you. 

Lucy: Elliot Taylor, thank you so much for this conversation, I’ve really, really enjoyed it and just in total awe of the work that you continue to do in a space that can be quite dark for some people. So on behalf of everyone listening, thank you so much, keep up the good work. 

Elliot: Thank you very much, it’s been fun. 

Lucy (outro): Did that conversation give you a little more hope? Did it present you with any fresh ideas for leveraging social media in a positive way? If you are interested in learning more about Elliot’s work and the Live For Tomorrow project, I’ve left those details in the show notes. If you like the perspectives that Selfie Reflective is presenting please rate, review and subscribe as this helps more people like you not only know that this show exists, but discover organisations like Live For Tomorrow as well. 

Until next Tuesday, I’m Lucy O, thank you so much for listening. This episode of Selfie Reflective was written, hosted and produced by me, Lucy O, final episode audio and quality control is all thanks to Tom Frankish. 

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