How HeartSupport is using technology to revolutionize mental health support online
You’re scrolling through YouTube late at night because you can’t sleep. This is nothing new; your depression means that you sleep all the time or not at all. But what is new is the video that comes across your feed, titled with the intriguing claim that it holds a therapist reacting to a song by Slipknot. Slipknot is your favorite band; they really seem to get what it’s like to suffer, and to do so alone. You click on the video.
The way that this clip unpacks the song is unlike any interpretation you’ve heard before, and it makes you think about all of the things keeping you awake tonight: the crushing weight in your chest. The disorientation of being both exhausted and jittery. The haunting feeling that no one really cares if you live or die.
For some reason, you leave a comment: “This video made me feel less alone tonight. I need help.”
Within minutes, you get a notification. Your heart almost stops as you read the comment in response to your own: “I’m so sorry you’re hurting. You’re not alone. Would you like to talk?”
This is the kind of situation that happened over 4,000 times in 2024 alone — the kind of life-changing intervention made possible by HeartSupport’s proprietary technology suite Porter, which is currently patent-pending.
“People everywhere are hurting. And candidly, music gives us a really natural place to express that pain. Tech has the opportunity for us to be watchers-at-the-wall - ready for anyone, anywhere they’re asking for help, and bring it to them.”
Nate Hilpert, Executive Director for HeartSupport, can still remember the days when it first became apparent that the technology didn’t exist to solve the problem HeartSupport was having. Music fans were opening up in the comments on social media platforms, sharing about their mental health the same way they might confide in a band member in person. But there was no way to find those people and respond to them. If they happened to get as far as HeartSupport’s forum, then trained repliers could offer them solidarity and compassion. But so many comments never got that far.
“People were asking for help in these private little corners of our comment sections, on public videos,” Nate recalls. “I knew we had a whole army of repliers, and if they just knew that those comments existed, they would reply! But without that knowledge, it meant these people were just forgotten, unheard, and unhelped.”
This left countless music fans in need. With no centralized hub for all requests for help, it was also difficult for Nate to report back to donors on how many individuals were opening up about their mental health. He found himself manually counting comments just to get a feel for what was really going on.
Meanwhile, HeartSupport’s longtime presence on Warped Tour was slowly fading from the picture as the tour came to a (temporary) end in 2019. In order to maximize the investment of the final days of Warped, HeartSupport set up a text platform that allowed music listeners to join a text list.
As Nate tells the story, “Taylor Palmby and I crashed every signing line we could, and we got 500 people to text in. We ran back to the August Burns Red bus to log into WiFi and see if anyone opened up, even one person. 130 people had texted us asking for help. It was wild.”
These are still the moments that remind Nate why HeartSupport’s presence in the scene just works.
“It's one of my favorite parts of this job: people taking a leap of faith, choosing to risk this terrifying thing of sharing about the things they haven't told others,” the Executive Director says. “It feels like holy ground receiving those messages, and then getting the opportunity to look back at them and say: you are not alone.”
Nate and HeartSupport’s Taylor Palmby were having to manually copy every single text to the forum for it to get a reply. They were essentially playing the role of porter, or message carrier, between the repliers on the forum and the music fan waiting on support.
One day, Nate opened up about this challenge to a software engineer friend who had already worked on the forum. He immediately rose to the challenge of creating a digital porter that would carry those messages back and forth automatically.
One of the first tests was with influencer Eugenia Cooney, who garnered 400 requests for support from a single tweet. HeartSupport began to recognize that they’d stumbled onto massive potential.
During the COVID pandemic, while all live event presence stalled, HeartSupport knew their online work to be more vital than ever. So they enlisted about a dozen volunteers who poured themselves into building what would become Porter, a tech suite that skims social media comment sections to identify requests for support and then integrates replies.
Longtime HeartSupport partner Ryan Kirby of Fit For A King tested it on an Instagram post in January of 2021. Porter helped the team identify 40 fans needing support.
The plan was working.
But big developments come with a high resource cost: in time, in personnel, in finances. These were all things HeartSupport was short on. Most of the volunteers who had developed the project had pressing personal matters that made it impossible to keep dedicating the necessary time to refining the bugs that arose as Porter grew.
Nate knew that the software was working. But he didn’t yet have the metrics to prove it. He would have to ask donors to step in with trust in a vision for something that had never been done before.
A string of miracles followed. As Nate and some of HeartSupport’s closest community members prayed and held intentional conversations, piece by piece, an unprecedented $90,000 came together to bring the vision of Porter to fully-realized life.
In 2022, HeartSupport hired Acacia, who has been the nonprofit’s developer ever since. He started with integrating it on Instagram, but quickly added YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Twitch, and Discord as well.
They now had what Nate called a “Swiss army knife of tech,” but it wasn’t perfect: it still required moderators to manually skim through the comments it pulled in, sifting out who was asking for help. Acacia’s response was to start a serious machine-learning process that would train Porter to designate which comments were requests for support and which were not.
HeartSupport implemented this shift in 2023 — just in time for their YouTube presence to explode in 2024 with the Therapist Reacts series. Suddenly, they were easily blowing past 3 million monthly views on their channels.
At the same time, as is near-universally true on the internet, negative comments increased as HeartSupport’s visibility grew. They trained Porter to solve that too, recognizing negative sentiment and moderating comments.
By the end of 2024, 95% of requests for peer support were coming from social media versus the traditional forum. HeartSupport made the decision to close the forum and focus entirely on social media — especially YouTube, where the shelf-life of content tends to be much longer than other platforms.
This decision was made with a lot of well-founded confidence. Porter accurately catches 97% of requests for mental health support, and two in every five of its predictions proves correct. Once it flags a comment, a human moderator evaluates if it really is a call for help. Then trained volunteers can respond.
A real exchange on YouTube
The software has already revolutionized how music listeners can ask for and receive support, but HeartSupport is just getting started.
“In 2025, we’re experimenting with using our tech in proactive ways,” Nate explains. “We have some new band partners, and they want us to impact their fans specifically. We realized that we can use our tech to scrape and grade comments from their music videos, we can find fans in their videos who are naturally opening up, and we can get them support.”
He summarizes, “So we’re starting to look beyond our own social media, and we are seeing innovative ways to apply this technology to other partners’ ecosystems: to find fans asking for help who just aren’t being seen.”
Ultimately, that’s the gift that tech like Porter has to offer: the gift of being seen. HeartSupport is so committed to this value that they are currently finalizing a patent for the software.
“As a part of our 5-year strategic plan, our target is to find ways for us to integrate into band social media and take over all fan mental health care for them across all of their social platforms,” Nate shares. “We want artists to be free to inspire their fans without feeling like they’re failing their fans if they don’t reply to every individual comment.”
Porter exemplifies the innovation that has always marked HeartSupport’s community-led approach to mental health support. It allows compassionate, expert volunteers to truly go and meet people directly where they already are: scrolling through YouTube late at night, desperate for hope but too afraid to look for it.
Nate concludes, “3 in 5 people who struggle never seek help. We not only believe music has a unique power to reach these people, but we believe that tech allows us to make it easier for them to ask for help.”
And when they ask, HeartSupport will answer. The 4,000 requests for support last year were answered by 180 passionate volunteers who were trained by seven staff members. Technology’s ability as a tool to amplify real human empathy makes the potential for healing exponential and endless.
Porter exists and works because of HeartSupport’s volunteers. If you’d like to become one of them, find out more at heartsupport.com/volunteer.
