By Karissa Bell From Mashable

Anonymous social network Whisper is known for being, well, anonymous. But now the company is undertaking a new effort to reach its most troubled users.

Whisper is adding user-created videos to its nonprofit arm, Your Voice, with the hope it will help inspire users who are struggling to deal with mental illness and other issues many of its young users face.

Your Voice is Whisper’s non-profit organization dedicated to raising awareness about mental illness and providing resources to the users who need them.

The site now also allows users to upload candid videos of themselves talking about how they dealt with and overcame issues like bullying, abuse, stress or mental illness. The goal, says Whisper cofounder Brad Brooks, is twofold: to inspire people who are struggling with mental illness or other issues through encouragement from their peers, and to help provide those users — who are most often teens or young adults — with offline resources that can help them.

“Whisper being an anonymous platform, a lot of people were coming to the app to express things that were very shocking or difficult for other people within the community,” Brooks told Mashable. “We didn’t want to be in a place where we were just shutting people out or not acknowledging and doing something in a constructive proactive manner. Whisper’s not designed to be a mental health service but there’s a lot of opportunity to help people in more of a constructive fashion. ”

Whisper, founded in 2012, remains one of the most successful anonymous platforms. The company reportedly raised a $30 million round of funding earlier this year and is valued at about $200 million.

The company has faced its share criticism — most recently from PostSecret founder Frank Warren who told Fortune he thinks aspects of Whisper and other anonymous networks have potential to put young people at risk.

While Whisper and other platforms like Secret have garnered criticism, Brooks says that he and cofounder Michael Heyward have always been dedicated to protecting users.

“This is something Michael and I thought about almost before one line of code was written at Whisper,” he said. “We always viewed anonymity as potentially a two-edged sword. There’s an incredible free and liberating aspect to it, and there’s obviously a potentially negative and dangerous place and we always want to protect against that.”

IMAGES:

IMAGE: MASHABLE COMPOSITE, YOUR VOICE, GETTY CREATIVE, DIDEM HIZAR, RASTUDIO

Your Voice’s new sharing platform. IMAGE: YOUR VOICE

For more on this story go to: http://mashable.com/2014/08/14/whisper-your-vice/