Ahead of World Mental Health Day, which is coming up next week (10/10), Pinterest has announced a new global partnership with Headspace, which will see the platform make a range of additional stress-relief and management tools available to users in the app.

As explained by Pinterest:

“The new partnership will invite hundreds of thousands of eligible creators to receive a free 6-month subscription to Headspace across 20 countries around the world – from Brazil to Germany, the US to Japan. Pinterest is the first and only tech platform to provide such an offering.”

Pinterest says that it’s aiming to support creators in staying balanced by ‘integrating wellbeing practices into their everyday lives through Headspace’s library of premium mindfulness content’ That includes a range of guided meditations, mindful walks, breathing exercises, focus music and more.

Which is important, because an increasing corpus of studies continues to underline the mental toll that the constant grind of creating and publishing content can take on people.

Last year, The New York Times published a report on the rising number of creators that are experiencing burnout, as they work to keep posting fresh updates every day, in order to meet the never-ending demands of online audiences.

As per NYT:

“Burnout has affected generations of social media creators. In 2017, Instagram influencers began leaving the platform, saying they were feeling depressed and discouraged. […] That same year, many large YouTube creators began stepping away from the platform, citing mental health issues.”

Indeed, many of the internet’s biggest stars, including PewDiePie and Charli D’Amelio, have cited significant mental challenges in maintaining their posting schedules. Of course, they don’t have to keep posting every other day, but the concern is that if they don’t, they’ll lose audience, and relevance, very quickly, undoing all of the work that they’ve put in to building their platform to begin with.  

Pinterest is well aware of these concerns. The platform has been adding in various mental health support tools over the past few years, including its in-built self-help, wellbeing exercises, which it launched in 2019, and ‘Compassionate Search’, which provides links to activities and tools to help Pinners connect with supportive resources when they go searching for related terms.

The new partnership with Headspace will build on these, providing more ways for Pinners to access help, support and guidance for mental health issues.

Which all platforms should be looking to implement, and while each now has a level of support available, the more that can be done the better in this respect.