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Paper short abstract

How do people negotiate support in Discord peer-led mental health communities? Drawing on digital ethnography, this study shows how channels, roles, and rules organise disclosure and response, turning lived experience into practices of responding to distress shaped by responsibility and risk.

Paper long abstract

Online mental health peer-support communities are often evaluated as either beneficial or harmful, yet such debates rarely examine how people actually attempt to support one another in everyday practice. This paper analyses mental health peer-support groups on Discord as infrastructures of sharing: configurations of channels, rules, roles, and technical systems through which people disclose distress, respond to others, and negotiate practices of support.

Drawing on 12 months of digital ethnography across six communities and interviews with members and moderators (n=20), I use abductive thematic analysis to trace how these arrangements shape peer support. Three mechanisms recur. First, separate channels (for example, general chat, ‘vent’, memes) create parallel publics with distinct visibility and response norms, sustaining ‘third-place’ sociality alongside support and allowing different forms of interaction to coexist. Second, role systems script support work: formalised roles (member, listener, moderator) assign response styles and obligations, turning personal experience into a recognised resource while distributing labour and accountability unevenly. Third, rules, technical settings, and moderation practices govern contact, defining who can interact, under what conditions, and how communities intervene in crisis situations such as harassment and self-harm disclosures.

Rather than treating peer support as a singular intervention, the paper argues that these infrastructures organise lived experience into everyday practices of support, negotiation, and risk, helping to explain why evaluations of online peer support often diverge. It contributes to anthropological discussions on peer care, experiential knowledge, and mental health in platformised environments.