Today Pinterest launched a new set of emotional well-being activities developed in collaboration with emotional health experts at Brainstorm, the Stanford Lab for Mental Health Innovation, Vibrant Emotional Health and the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline. The search function has been updated to reflect stressful, anxious or sad queries which may be harmful for the user. Upon entering such criteria in the search bar, the new activities are listed in the results.
The guided activities and exercises are designed to help emotionally distressed people in interactive ways to try to lift their spirits, to help users calm down or learn to feel compassion or self-compassion. When users search for terms such as "stress quotes" or "work anxiety", they will be prompted to explore these exercises and similar resources. In the event where a user looks up keywords indicating self-harm or suicidal tendencies, the person will be directed to the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline.
Additionally, Pinterest claims that interaction with these activities will be kept private and unassociated to the users" main accounts. Therefore no data will be collected from these exercises preventing recommendations or advertisements based on the usage of the emotional well-being activities and resources. The entire experience will be kept completely separate from the main platform.
The emotional well-being activities and resources announced today will be rolled out to Pinterest users in the U.S. in the oncoming weeks. For now, the new tools and exercises will only be available on the Pinterest app(v 7.25) for iOS and Android. It is expected that the feature will be available to users on all platforms at some point in the future.