Why peer support for students?
Peer support relies on students using their own personal experiences to help each other. It provides a sense of connection that’s essential for our mental, emotional, and physical wellbeing.
Beyond social connection, the benefits of peer support are wide-ranging and well-evidenced for young people and adults alike.
Peer support research has shown that it’s associated with:
Reductions in depression, loneliness and anxiety
Greater sense of happiness
Increased self-esteem
Improved quality of life and social functioning
When students are struggling with their mental health, they often just want a space to feel heard and accepted. Peer support can help your student population find the words to say what they need and the confidence to ask for it.
Why TalkCampus?
Want your students to thrive and stay safe? Our Impact Report shows that since using the platform:
70%
feel less isolated
82%
feel more understood
72%
say their relationships have improved
60%
feel more able to cope with their studies
The mental health research behind TalkCampus
TalkCampus is a global 24/7 mental health support network for students, combining world-class technology, intuitive design, and clinical excellence.
TalkCampus is powered by TalkLife, the world's leading mental health support network. It’s the only peer support platform clinically evidenced to increase users' confidence in their ability to manage their own mental health and reduce harmful behaviors (Kruzan et al. 2022). A recent study (Rickard et al. 2022) also placed TalkLife in the top ten of quality mental health apps, after it scored highly in areas including accessibility, security and privacy, and evidence and clinical base.
We’re proud to have an ORCHA score of 82%, which breaks down key assessment criteria relating to clinical assurance, data privacy, and user experience.
Like TalkLife, our student platform is rooted in in-depth mental health and peer support research. Find out more below.
Our commitment to impact
Impact-focused and transparent reporting
Our impact framework underpins our product development and our extensive mental health research programs with some of the world's leading university teams inform our understanding of mental health and the critical role technology can play in offering support. We hold a strong commitment to tangible research outcomes that have timely and relevant applications.
We are also committed to understanding our own impact as a platform and regularly undertake assessments and research to understand this.
Reporting and
data-sharing
As a TalkCampus university, you will receive quarterly de-identified reports that highlight current usage patterns and any key trends across your student population.
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Patterns of usage
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Engagement levels
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Mood and topics discussed
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Outliers and community sentiment
Your institution-specific trends and data will be kept confidential and will not be disclosed to any third parties or partner universities. We’ll also support you with building engagement and increasing awareness of TalkCampus across your student body based on current trends.
Data protection and security
At TalkCampus, we strive to uphold the highest data privacy standards for our users. We have implemented a suite of security across our architecture to ensure our members’ privacy and security are upheld. Through our governance and overarching management, we continually review our security policies and procedures.
We comply with the relevant data security and privacy standards of the UK, Australia, the US, and the EU. More information about what data is collected and how it is collected can be found in our privacy policy here.
Students feel the impact of TalkCampus
"Having a safe space to rant and rave about your struggles really helps to lessen them. This app gives you that in an easy-to-navigate space full of people sharing the same experiences. Really just what I needed right now."
“Downloading this app was the best thing I could have done. It means the world knowing that people who don’t even know me are willing to be there for me if I need somebody.”
“This app was really good! It creates so much care, I have never felt this much support from just an app, and that too from students who are like me!!! It’s really fresh....”
Clinical advisors
Bringing together some of the best minds across suicide prevention, self-harm, and the provision of mental health support online, our Advisory Board provides a clinical steer across all safeguarding and platform development.
TalkLife Advisory Board
Edgar Pierce Prof. of Psychology
Harvard College Prof. Chair,
Dep. of Psychology,
Harvard University
RICHARD GRAHAM
TalkLife Advisory Board
TalkLife Safety & Wellbeing Director
Consultant Psychiatrist, UKCCIS, London Digital Mental Wellbeing Service
A.M., Ph.D. candidate in clinical psychology, Harvard University
DR JANIS WHITLOCK
TalkLife Advisory Board
Director of the Cornell Research Program on Self-Injury and Recovery
DR JOHN DRAPER
TalkLife Advisory Board
Director, National Suicide
Prevention Lifeline
DR DAN REIDENBERG
TalkLife Advisory Board
Exec Director, Suicide Awareness
Voices of Education
KARTHIK DINAKAR
TalkLife Advisory Board
Reid Hoffman Fellow
MIT AI Data Scientist
ERIC HORVITZ
TalkLife Collaborator / Advisor
MD, Microsoft Research
CHRISTIAN SEJERSEN
TalkLife Board / Advisor
LEO Innovation
JENNIFER RUSSELL
Chair, TalkLife Advisory Board Director Research and Safeguarding TalkLife Ltd
DR BECKY INKSTER
TalkLife Advisory Board
Alan Turing Centre
WALTER DEMPSEY
Assistant Professor of Biostatistics and Assistant Research Professor at the Institute of Social Research
Our world-leading
research partners
TalkCampus is committed to engaging with peer support research, demonstrating our impact, and contributing to the evidence base. We are passionate about peer support and its potential to meet the increasing demand for mental health support. We want to put an end to people struggling alone and reach any student who needs support.
TalkCampus collaborates on world-leading research projects and works with teams and universities who help us to understand and improve the lives of people who are struggling with their mental health.
Our researchers are working on key research questions across topics including:
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Machine learning
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NLP modeling
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Online safety
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Peer support and online communication
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Self-harming behavior and suicidal ideation
Our partner institutions include:
Microsoft Research
Moments of change: Analyzing peer-based cognitive support in online mental health forums
Yada Pruksachatkun, NYU Center for Data Science
Sachin R. Pendse, Microsoft Research India
Amit Sharma, Microsoft Research India
University of Washington
How do interactions between users impact their mood and user behavior in short and long-term, with implications for training of peers and counselors?
Tim Althoff, UW Computer Science
Dave Atkins, UW Psychiatry and Behavioural Sciences
Nottingham Trent University
Exploring relationships between mental health problems, triggers and consequences and potential of deep learning and AI for support.
Dr Eiman Kanjo Senior Lecturer
Cornell University
Promoting recovery from non-suicidal self-injury: Assessing the efficacy of a mobile intervention for reducing self-injury severity
Bronfenbrenner Center for Translational Research (BCTR)
Georgia Tech
Development of computational and analytical approaches to examine and understand 'coming out of the closet' expressions in online communities, how it affects mental health in LGBT (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender) individuals, and how online support communities cater to these needs.
Munmun De Choudhury (PI; Assistant Professor, Georgia Tech)
Eva Sharma (PhD Student)
Sang-Chan Kim (Undergraduate Student)
Oliver Haimson (PhD Student)
The Alan Turing Institute
Creation of robust longitudinal NLP models for capturing changes in language use and other online behaviour over time as a proxy for assessing mental well-being.
Dr Maria Liakata, Adam Tsakalidis, Bo Wang, Dong Nguyen, Theo Damoulas, Weisi Guo, Marya Bazzi, Elena Kochkina, Nicole Peinelt, Terry Lyons, Maria Wolters, colleagues from the Department of Psychiatry at Oxford and the Division of Psychiatry at Edinburgh.
Harvard University
A collaboration between TalkLife and researchers from Microsoft Research, Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard University to better understand and predict self harm, with the aim to create meaningful interventions.
This collaboration has been approved by the Institutional Review Board at MIT and Harvard, and the ethics board at Microsoft Research.
There are no commercial agreements or funding arrangements between the collaborating organisations. MIT, Harvard, Microsoft Research.
University of Central Florida
Exploration of the intersection of adolescent online safety, mental health, social support and coping for teens.
Nick Allen (Primary Investigator)
University of Oregon
Department of Psychology
Georgia Tech, School of Interactive Computing, Isabel Granic, Radboud University, Developmental psychopathology
Shalini Lal, University of Montreal
Purdue University, College of Health and Human Sciences
Department of Computer Science, University of Central Florida
Swansea University
This is part of a larger study utilising electronic data to address key challenges around children and young people’s mental health.
The project aims to bring together data related to a range of issues from education to social media use.
Part of this project is centred on adverse childhood experiences (ACES; these include things like bullying,
abuse and family issues) and their relationship with mental health and self-harm.
Ulm University
University of Guelph
Impact of online communication to self-injury
PhD Associate Professor
Department of Psychology