Innerscript is a youth mental health community platform. It turns brain science research into practical tools, workshops, and peer support that young people can actually use.
The platform gives people a safe space to share experiences, read evidence-based mental health resources, and talk with others who understand.
Mental health support should be accessible, practical, and grounded in science.
Innerscript works to close the gap between neuroscience research and everyday life through:
- Brain science education
- Evidence-based mental health toolkits
- Peer support communities
- School workshops and awareness programs
- Google OAuth login and email signup
- Email verification
- Django sessions
- Privacy-focused handling of user data
Users can share personal experiences, write posts and discussions, reply to others, and like content. Each post can carry an image (UUID filename, 5 MB cap, extension whitelist). Every user keeps a profile with a bio, avatar, and role.
Posts carry a Community Score. It is a heuristic on the likes to comments ratio of a post, not sentiment analysis. It sets the default feed order.
The feed supports three sort modes through ?sort=:
scoreranks by Community Scorerecentshows newest firstdiscussedshows the most commented threads
Posts come in three kinds (blog, discussion, resource) and can be filed under categories. The point is to surface well discussed conversations instead of raw popularity.
Anxiety coping strategies, journaling techniques, breathing exercises, stress management, and general mental health education.
Innerscript collects only a name or username and an email address. It does not store Google profile photos, OAuth tokens, location data, ad trackers, or third-party analytics. Users can view their data, edit their profile, and delete their account permanently.
Runtime dependencies are pinned in requirements.txt:
- Django 6.0 and django-allauth for auth
- Pillow for image handling
- django-csp and django-axes for security
- djangorestframework
- gunicorn and whitenoise for serving
- psycopg2-binary and dj-database-url for Postgres
- python-dotenv for
.envloading
You need Python 3.12 and a .env file at the repo root. Set DJANGO_SECRET_KEY at a minimum. For local dev set DJANGO_DEBUG=1. Google login needs GOOGLE_CLIENT_ID and GOOGLE_CLIENT_SECRET.
pip install -r requirements.txt
python manage.py migrate
python manage.py createsuperuser
python manage.py runserverEmail verification links print to the console in dev. Swap EMAIL_BACKEND to SMTP for production.
The Dockerfile builds on python:3.12-slim and runs as a non-root user. On start it runs migrations, collects static files, and serves through gunicorn on port 8000. WhiteNoise serves the collected assets.
docker build -t innerscript .
docker run -p 8000:8000 --env-file .env innerscriptDJANGO_SECRET_KEY must be present in the environment at runtime, since migrate and collectstatic run on container start rather than at build time.
Innerscript is built around empathy and respect. It offers peer support and educational resources, but it is not a replacement for professional mental health care.
Anyone in a crisis should contact a local emergency service, a trusted adult, or a qualified mental health professional.
Developed for Innerscript and its mission of improving youth mental health accessibility.