Yahoo Sports Meet the founder of Letters to Strangers, the largest global youth-for-youth mental health non-profit
After facing her own experience with mental health struggles, Diana Chao (@dizzodin) founded a global mental health non-profit to destigmatize mental illness and increase access to affordable, quality treatment. Her organization, Letters to Strangers (@l2smentalhealth), annually impacts over 35,000 people across 20 countries.
“It’s hard to find hope sometimes, but I think what keeps me and so many people in our organization going are those stories that we hear every day,” Diana says.
Letters to Strangers’ main programming takes the form of three different pathways: Science-based peer education, grassroots policy-based advocacy and the organization’s namesake, letter writing. These anonymous, handwritten letter exchanges occur through Letters to Strangers’ chapters, on school campuses, in local communities or through an online platform allowing the public to participate in a digital version.
Diana explains that she was diagnosed with bipolar disorder at age 13, then developed an eye disease a year later that caused her blindness for half of high school. “Struggling with both of these things made me lose the light in my life in many ways,” she shares. “So that’s when I started trying all sorts of different things, including writing letters. And that was what stuck with me the most. I wrote letters to strangers, and I realized for the first time that I have a voice, I have a story worth telling.”
From Diana’s viewpoint, letter-writing offers several components to help one’s mental well-being. She says that compared to journaling, letter-writing can keep a writer’s thoughts on the positive track as many of us tend to be our own worst enemies.
“Writing to a stranger really helped me,” Diana says. “It gave me this idea that I was talking to someone. I felt like I needed to give them some sort of idea that there could be a good resolution to this. I didn’t want to just leave them on a cliffhanger. And that forced me to think about the options that I had, to give myself some hope as well.”
Writing letters also helps create a community within Letters to Strangers, as reading these letters from strangers helps people realize that they are not alone, giving them a moment of support that might have been missing. “I think that gives the connection that so many people we work with feel is lacking otherwise,” Diana says.
Diana explains that suicide is the second-highest leading cause of death in the world for young people and that access to mental health resources is extremely limited outside of the western hemisphere.
“That’s why I think that Letters to Strangers is important,” she says. “Not just for us and people involved with us, but for people around the world who are going through their own struggles but feel like they can’t say anything. This is an invitation to let them know that they truly are not alone.”
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