Online mental health peer support forums and rural resilience: A research summary showing how research forums support resilience-building for rural people with lived experiences of mental ill-health

Resilience has been described as the ability to respond to shocks and upheaval. In this project, researchers were particularly interested in resilience as the combined resources that individuals and communities need in order to adapt and thrive. While there is no single agreed ‘measure’ of resilience, consensus suggests it involves a set of social assets previously proven to be significant to social capacity - including social capital, self-efficacy, sense of belonging to community, capacity to recover, and access to ongoing learning opportunities. In the project, the researchers focused particularly on the role of online communities – or online forums – for and co-created by people experiencing mental health conditions. They focused on people living in rural areas in Australia, as multiple research reports and government reviews consistently show that rural people, generally, are more likely to experience a range of adversities when compared with urban residents. For people experiencing mental ill-health, prominent among these adversities are challenges in reaching a range of services, accessing services in a crisis and alongside this, social challenges of isolation and stigma. Data collection and analysis for the overall project occurred during the COVID-19 pandemic which, to some extent, had effects – e.g. the non-profit organisations we were working with were, rightly, focused on other priorities sometimes, and forum users were more, or less, interested to participate – depending on stages of lockdowns.