Although UW provides telephone listening services for students who need an objective, open-minded and anonymous ear, sometimes picking up a phone is still too hard.

Enter U-TYPE, an electronic listening service offered through Hall Health’s U-HELP program. With U-TYPE, students can send anonymous written messages to a trained volunteer and receive an electronic response to their query.

Mark Shaw, the director of health promotions at Hall Health, modified an idea that the U.K. has been using for years.

“I went to a conference of British programs that have the phone line like we have with U-CALL — they’re all over British schools,” Shaw said. “Some of the programs there had added the e-mail component.”

Shaw teamed up with Heather Larson, Web site and health information manager, to create the actual Web site.

“It works like Craigslist,” he said. “You post an anonymous message and you get a log-in name and password that you later use to retrieve your responses.”

U-TYPE is advertised as a listening service. Students go to the Web site, www.U-TYPE.org, and can ask any nagging questions they may have or simply blow off steam about relationships on the rocks, disrespectful roommates or bad grades.

Shaw also worked with mental health professionals, risk management assessors and even lawyers from the attorney general to ensure that the students using the system would retain their anonymity.

Because the site is housed on an off-campus server, there is no way that messages could be leaked or students could be identified.

After two and a half years in development, U-TYPE was launched last quarter during finals week.

The student program coordinator at the U-HELP office in Hall Health receives the questions. After that, the program coordinator drafts a response, runs it by a mental health professional and sends it back to the questioner within 48 hours.

One of the program coordinators, junior Chris Chan, detailed the goal of U-TYPE.

“We want to provide a safe space where people can be uncensored and free from judgment,” he said. “In the long run, the goal is to empower people to make decisions that they are comfortable with.”

The new program is expected to reach a portion of the student population that prior programs like U-CALL and other less anonymous systems did not.

“Traditionally, guys are alleged to not want to talk about their feelings,” Shaw said. “What they’ve found in the British programs is that men are much more willing to bang out on the keyboard whatever is going on — they’re not shy at all about e-mail messages.”

Shaw hopes U-TYPE will function as an anonymous service that all students will feel comfortable using.

“The response has been phenomenal,” Chan said. “I don’t think anyone imagined that we would be getting this many messages.”

Students can expect U-TYPE to become a more integral part of campus as it continues to aid students through hard times.

Chan hopes a campus-wide event will be possible in the future.

The working title of such an event: Group Hug, UDub.

[Reach reporter Kyle Frischkorn at news@thedaily.washington.edu.]