Anonymous Counseling Bot
Overview
A production Telegram bot that routes confidential mental health conversations between users and counselors across multiple independent organizations. Built in Go with PostgreSQL, it handles multi-tenant isolation, role management, and real-time session orchestration entirely through the bot interface.
Challenge
Students at my university fellowship avoided counseling due to fear of social exposure. The technical challenge was guaranteeing absolute anonymity — no counselor can ever derive a user's real identity — while still enabling reliable, low-latency message delivery, expertise-based routing, and operational oversight for administrators across separate organizations.
Solution
Built a Go backend that proxies all messages through randomized identifiers, making identity reconstruction impossible at the application layer. Added a topic-based matchmaking algorithm to pair users with domain-appropriate counselors, multi-tenant data isolation with RBAC configurable directly through bot commands, full i18n support for Amharic and English, and a real-time telemetry layer tracking average counselor response times.
Key Technologies
Impact
Deployed to 10+ organizations with hundreds of active users. Student engagement with counseling services rose by over 60% across participating institutions — reaching people who previously had no safe channel to seek support.