Mental Earth Community (MEC) evolved from Mental Help Net (MHN) forums that were created in the mid to late 90s. MHN is still among the top mental health resource sites on the Web. In 2001, MHN became separated from its former corporate source of support and its directors, now charged with the task of making the site pay for itself, no longer had the resources to continue with the forums. Not wishing the forums to be shut down, MHN decided to transfer ownership of the community to Warren Selekman, Ph.D., a NY state psychologist, who had previously served as community director and who had indicated his willingness to take over hosting duties and maintain continuity. Dr. Selekman and his small staff worked along side with MHN’s Dr. Dombeck for weeks and many hours into the night preparing the site before the eventual closing of the MHN forums. In October of 2002, MEC opened its doors and many of MHN’s members migrated over.

Mental Earth prospered.. It adopted the motto “Support in a Safe and Secure Environment.” Our community has been and will continue to be a protective site, free of sponsors, unregistered guests and Internet search engines. . Mental Earth tries to find a healthy balance between free speech and keeping the peace. It has a low tolerance for flaming posts and those who intentionally cause trouble. Members are expected to treat one another with respect despite differences.

The Divide

Like any community, we had our challenges. In May of 2004, an incident occurred creating two camps among our members. This led to losing a third of our membership. Some members who left formed their own support communities. This was a heartbreaking setback for us.

Our staff has learned valuable lessons from this incident creating precautions and developing policies to avoid similar situations in the future. These measures include more respectful communication between staff members despite differing opinions, addressing problems and implementing solutions in a timely manner, as well as administration demonstrating more flexibility in responding to the needs and wishes of the community.

The Crash

On May 1, 2006, our hosting server suffered an irreversible hardware failure resulting in the complete loss of data, including backup files. We had nearly five years’ worth of posts all gone in a nanosecond. We were stunned and in shock. It's not hard to understand why our owner, Warren, felt he could not reinvest the tremendous amount of time and money to start from scratch. E-mails were sent out to members asking for their feedback. Everyone was in favor of rebuilding the site.

Warren turned the site over to Eros (Richard). Through the tremendous help of one of our moderators, Greg (Dazed n Confused), Mental Earth got back on its feet. Greg had the technical knowledge and skills to get us up and running quickly. This was no small feat. This involved buying the domain’s name, finding a new host server, pointing our domain to the new server, transferring the Invision license, installing the software, setting up the board to the best of our memory and trying to keep our members informed daily by e-mail.

On May 13, 2006, Mental Earth Community opened its doors again. By June, all of our active members had re-registered and our board-activity returned to its previous levels. Since then, Mental Earth has enjoyed continued growth and additions to the site such as our Front Pages. We were able to restore our Blogs, Gallery, Chat, and add on a game arcade, and best of all, reunite our caring members. We believe the sign of a strong community is its ability to bounce back from adversity through the cohesion of its members. Mental Earth has been an example of that spirit. We hope you’ll join in and become a part of its future.

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