COVID-19 Epidemic Peer Support and Crisis Intervention Via Social Media

This article describes a peer support project developed and carried out by a group of experienced mental health professionals, organized to offer peer psychological support from overseas to healthcare professionals on the frontline of the COVID-19 outbreak in Wuhan, China. This pandemic extremely challenged the existing health care systems and caused severe mental distress to frontline healthcare workers. The authors describe the infrastructure of the team and a novel model of peer support and crisis intervention that utilized a popular social media application on smartphone. Such a model for intervention that can be used elsewhere in the face of current global pandemic, or future disaster response.