Living Well with Schizophrenia

Hello and welcome! We’ll get straight to the point: We need your support. In the past year alone over 2.8 million people have used Living Well with Schizophrenia as a free resource. We depend on the support of our audience to create this valuable resource, but 99.5% of our viewers don’t give support (or just aren’t able to give support). If you are someone who has benefited from the content we’ve created and you’re able to help support this resource, please donate today. Thank you for helping us to keep this channel going.

Our Story

Schizophrenia affects over 24 million people worldwide, but resources are severely lacking for this population. When Lauren was first experiencing symptoms, one of the first places she turned to learn more was YouTube. Unfortunately, there wasn't much information available then, especially when it came to hearing from people with lived experience.

When we started the Living Well with Schizophrenia YouTube channel, we aimed to create a few short videos that would fill this gap. Lauren decided to share vulnerably about her own experiences living with the illness to help others feel less alone.

Now, three years after starting the channel, it’s grown larger than we had ever imagined. We’ve felt tremendous pressure and motivation to keep responding to the needs of our audience, and we take the responsibility of serving those needs very seriously.

Why We’re Asking For Your Support

We are primarily audience funded and would like to stay that way to stay as true to you, our audience, as possible.

We've been so fortunate to have an audience that gives us some support through Patreon - the channel wouldn’t be what it is today without them. But while we’re incredibly grateful for this support, it’s not enough to sustain our work on the channel. Also, we understand that a monthly subscription model isn't the best option for everyone and that a one-time donation might be preferred, which is why we're having this GoFundMe.

Aside from Patreon, we also have advertising on our videos where possible, which helps. However, we don’t make very much at all off of advertising. Also, we understand the value of creating specific videos (like expert interviews) that don’t get mass appeal or bring in much ad revenue - but are very valuable to our core audience.

Funding production of the channel and covering basic costs has been tricky. We occasionally accept partnerships with brands we believe in and find value in for our audience for sponsored content. Still, our options are minimal, and this takes up a lot of time that could be better spent working on new content and resources. Pharmaceutical companies also fund most advocates in the mental health space. However, we continue to avoid accepting money directly from pharmaceutical companies as it feels like a conflict of interest.

We have a vision for how we can grow the channel into an even more valuable resource. We need your help to make that happen.

How Your Donation Will Help

We have a lot of exciting plans for the channel over the next year.

We have been working to develop paid opportunities within Living Well with Schizophrenia for people who are living with a schizophrenia spectrum illness. We currently offer these paid opportunities for peer support facilitation in our online peer support community and for developing resources we have shared within the community. We would love to be able to keep expanding these opportunities to include paying people with lived experience to help out with research for content and much more. We are looking to build a team to keep bettering what we can offer the Living Well with Schizophrenia audience and community.

Now that we are coming out of the restrictions of COVID, we want to get back to sharing more people’s stories. We want to create in-depth, documentary-style content sharing the experiences of others navigating a schizophrenia spectrum illness. We also hope to conduct more interviews with medical professionals and experts in the field. Not only does this content take more resources to execute these videos, but we also want to ensure we are fairly compensating those who are taking the time to share their experiences and expertise with us.

We want to keep working on building the Living Well with Schizophrenia online peer support community as a valuable tool and resource. We are hoping to be able to offer live expert Q&A sessions for community members to take part in and learn from. Of course, this takes a considerable amount of time and resources to coordinate and orchestrate. Your contribution would help us hire more team members to make this a reality and fairly compensate the professionals coming to share their knowledge and expertise.

A lot of people may not realize that this YouTube channel is what we work on full-time. And, of course, it costs us money to maintain and operate the equipment that allows us to create high-quality content for our audience. It also takes considerable time and energy to keep making the content and resources we are building. Your donation helps us make sure we can pay our bills, feed our family, and keep a roof over our heads to keep doing this!

No worries, we understand if a monetary donation is not within your means right now.

You can still support the cause by sharing this GoFundMe campaign with your friends and family.

Note: No rewards are offered for donations. We had previously provided some small tokens of appreciation for donations, but this violated GoFundMe's terms and conditions. Our sincere apologies.

Also, a reminder that supporting us with a monthly subscription donation through Patreon is an option. Patreon is also how to gain access to our online peer support community. Note: Please let us know if you are interested in joining our online peer support community, but the monthly donation is a barrier.

www.patreon.com/livingwellwithschizophrenia

Message from Lauren & Rob

We appreciate your support!

We have seen the significant impact our channel and community have had on the lives of those living with schizophrenia and related psychosis spectrum illnesses and their loved ones. We want to keep expanding that impact, reaching more people, and improving the resources we can provide.

Thank you for believing in us. We’re so grateful for your support.

Warm regards,

Lauren & Rob (Creators of Living Well with Schizophrenia)

Testimonials