The problem VentOUT solves

Life can get hard sometimes. Whether in school, work, relationships, or physical health, we all face challenges that make us angry and disappointed. People often remove this frustration by cursing out loud and in the process hurt somebody else or by punching a wall, hurting themselves. Studies show that such actions, known as venting out, positively impact your mental health but negatively impact those around you. Venting out is good for you but venting out in the correct manner is even more important.

We are inspired by President Abraham Lincoln’s “hot letters” written during the civil war, ones that he wrote to vent out his frustration with his colleagues and enemies but never posted. Today we have many more sophisticated tools to vent out all our anger and we made a platform to do so in an effective manner. We call this platform VentOut

When an individual is stressed, they often look for an outlet to release their tension, whether it be through friends, family or even just yelling out into the street. VentOUT takes this simple idea and creates a space where anyone can anonymously vocalize their feelings and see that they are not alone in their struggles.

VentOUT is a chat application created to make it easier for individuals to vent and vocalize their inner thoughts. We take in a user's audio message, transcribe it to text and post it in an anonymous space. At the same time, we provide these individuals with positive resources to understand what is making them upset and encourage them to take appropriate action. We have identified 4 main categories where people face challenges with mental health: work, school, relationship, and health. For each of these categories, we provide users with a chat room to anonymously express their frustrations and curse out loud. In order to ensure there is no toxic profanity on our application, we filter out curse words said by the user in their frustration.

Challenges I ran into

I started this hackathon with a singular aim: to make an interface that allows users to vocalize their inner struggles in order to improve their mental health—the faced problem in time management.