At Walk in My Shoes (WIMS), we have community guidelines in place for our social media spaces.
WIMS is the flagship awareness-raising and education campaign of St Patrick’s Mental Health Services (SPMHS). All voices are welcome in our social media space.
We work to promote positive mental health, to tackle mental health stigma and to change how people, particularly young people, think about mental health. We offer free wellbeing resources for young people, teachers and parents; run campaigns like #MindYourSelfie and WIMS Live; and host numerous events and Transition Year Programmes.
We aim to create and maintain a safe, inclusive, open and respectful social media community, where we can engage with each other in a healthy and supportive way. We are active on several social media platforms – including Youtube, Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook - where you can take part in our campaigns, find mental health information and wellbeing supports, and get in touch with us.
We hope these community guidelines help you to understand how we will act within our social media spaces, and what we expect from you and others in this online community.
Online safety
Your online safety is important to us. Social media is a public space and sharing information on social media is like having a conversation in public – so please think before you post.
We advise you to:
- check your own media settings, making sure your social profiles are set to private or friends only
- not give out personal information online
- not accept friend requests from people you do not know.
- know how to block and, if necessary, report someone on a social media site.
You can find more information about staying safe online here.
If you feel that using social media is affecting your mental health, you can find some helpful tips on managing your online wellbeing here.
House rules
We keep respect for one another at the heart of our social media community, and have some simple rules in place to keep this community a welcoming and helpful place for everyone. These rules are in place so that we are all considerate and appropriate in how we engage with each other.
We ask that you follow these rules at all times. Please note that they apply to all content you post, including comments, profile photographs, user names and more; if you do not accept them, please do not use our social media channels.
Rules
The most important thing for us is that we are all respectful and treat each other as we ourselves would like to be treated when using our social media channels.
Please remember that every person using social media is responsible for the content they post; we do not necessarily agree with the views expressed by others who share on our channels and we cannot stand over the accuracy of content shared by others. You may see content on our social media channels that you do not like or agree with, but that does not necessarily go against our house rules.
To keep our social media space a safe, engaging and enjoyable space, please:
- Be polite and tolerant | Everyone has a right to dignity and equality. Don’t share content that is offensive, harassing or prejudiced towards others on grounds of gender, race, mental health or disability, ethnicity, sexual orientation or others.
- Be sensitive | Please remember that people may be going through different things in their lives, and we don’t always know what these are. If you are sharing emotional or triggering content, please consider making others aware of this at the beginning of your post. Do not post content that is overly graphic, needlessly violent, sexually explicit, or encouraging of harm.
- Be open and transparent | Listen to other’s opinions, even if you don’t agree with them; take part in discussions in a constructive way; and do not pretend to be another person or organisation.
- Respect people’s privacy | Privacy is important for everyone; please do not share people’s contact details or personal information. You can see our organisational Privacy Notice here; please be aware that each social media platform has its own privacy policies which will apply in your use of social media.
Responses
Examples of content that we believe goes against our house rules include content which we feel is:
- offensive, abusive or threatening
- vulgar or obscene
- discriminatory or unlawful
- misleading or falsely impersonating others
- defamatory
- spam, or repeated posts of the same and/or off-topic message(s)
- trolling in nature, or aiming to deliberately provoke or upset others.
We take a zero tolerance approach to these kinds of content across all digital communications, including social media posts and comments, digital adverts, and so on.
If we feel your content falls under the examples above, in most cases, we will respond and request that you remove the relevant content yourself, providing details of our feedback pathways for an offline conversation if appropriate. We reserve the right to hide or remove any content that we feel goes against our house rules and to block users who do not wish to respect them. This includes hiding comments on digital adverts and boosted posts that are in violation of our house rules. If we do so, we may respond to you on the relevant social media platform to let you know that this is happening, unless your content has gone against our house rules on repeated occasions and we have explained this to you in the past. We also reserve the right to screenshot and save any posts, comments or messages required for security, administrative and legal purposes.
Monitoring and crisis support
We monitor our social media channels from 9am to 5pm, Monday to Friday (excluding bank holidays).
Our digital communications team strives to engage with content in a timely way, and always aims to respond to your questions. We carefully choose who we follow, like and share content from, but we cannot follow, like or share everything requested or received.
When helping you with your queries or responding to comments, our team may ask you to send us a private message by email or through a social media platform. This is to protect privacy and ensure we can identify how we can best help you.
WIMS is not a mental health service and we do not provide crisis support across our social media channels. However, we may use our social media channels to share information about support services, including crisis support. If you are in need of information about mental health services, you can learn more about supports available here, including contact details for crisis supports and services.
Complaints
If you are concerned about content on our social media channels, please let us know: you can email info@walkinmyshoes.ie.
If you would like to make a complaint about WIMS or our social media channels, please get in touch by emailing the complaint and your contact details to info@walkinmyshoes.ie. Our team will respond and follow appropriate feedback pathways with you.
Please note we reserve the right to amend, correct or add to these community guidelines at any time, with or without prior notice.