My journey to build a non-judgmental community

Jianhong Zhou
3 min readMar 16, 2020

It cost me six years, my whole life saving, and hundreds of failures and rejections, I realized my dream is not “mental health service”, but a non-judgemental community, in a noisy and judgemental virtual world.

Almost ten years ago, I felt I had “depression,” and there were nearly half a year when I could not sleep very well. I think I was very old, and I started disliking all kinds of new things, such as the iPhone and social media. However, after I tried social media for a while, I became addicted. The more I used it, the more I disliked its “psychological control”, but I failed to pull me out to “something meaningful.” I started reading and writing, and finally, I felt “there was no meaning for my life and career.”

On the first day of 2013, I told myself: change this meaningless life before the end of 2013. I calculated all kinds of consequences and options for my future, and it ended up with only one outcome: fear. I was scared to make such a change.

I quit my job on the last day of 2013, and I started over my life!

In 2014, I decided to go back to school and got a psychology degree. I made that decision because of my assumption: my world view may have some problem due to the education and environment I had in China. I got one admission from Arizona State University, and the other 27 delined me [I had no background in psychology].

2015, I came to Phoenix, and my family settled down in a quiet community close to South Mountain, but we experienced tremendous anxiety due to the dramatic changes in our life. In the most challenging time, my self-diagnosis told me I had eight mental disorders.

Stigma is the No. 1 barrier for mental health, and I started to have the idea of creating a system where people can have help themselves without shame. I founded HOOP with Dr. Terence Tracey on the Halloween in 2016. We had the same mission:

We can help ourselves anywhere, anytime when we need it.

The dream sounds fabulous, but the journey is not so shiny as I had expected. What is the exact system that we are trying to build? We did not have a clear answer.

Until today, I worked with more than 70 people in HOOP, we have changed the product direction six times and pivoted more than 100 times the marketing messages. Mental health is not a fun business, and many startups have failed. We are still working on it, but yet to succeed.

After I dismissed my team last month, I spent another one month reflecting my own life story, my counseling and career coaching experience with more than 100 people, the three years working as the founder of HOOP, and the notably pandemic in the world right now, I concluded, we need

A NON-JUDGEMENTAL COMMUNITY.

There is research echoing my reflection, “the more you judge people, the worse you will feel.”

Everyone has judgemental thinking or behaviors due to our limited understanding of ourselves and the world. However, the Internet and social media have scaled up judgemental actions. Social media makes “Like” and “Dislike” much cheaper and creates a convenient place to fight without seeing each other.

Judging others may change friends into enemies, and brings no help to solve our problems. Several years ago, before I left China, I felt more and more people were judging other people or things they had no idea, but now, I have the same feeling here in the USA.

When many people tell me they don’t like Facebook, to me, it means we don’t want to be judged by others.

There is a lot of research findings that suggest that social media usage is highly correlated with depression and anxiety. I believe social media should not be accused, but the way to use it should hold accountable.

We can listen, even though we don’t have to agree. If we can provide empathic feedback to others to open their mindset without defensiveness, it is beneficial to the wellbeing of them and ourselves.

Is this dream accomplishable?

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HOOP Anonymous Support APP; Facebook Support Group

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Jianhong Zhou

Founder of HOOP (www.thehoop.us), leadership coach, former IBM leader, global citizen with footprints in 40+ countries, degree collector, athlete, and comedian