Welcome back to Reading the Research, where I trawl the Internet to find noteworthy research on autism and related subjects, then discuss it in brief with bits from my own life, research, and observations.
Today's article is likely a look into the future of mental health support tools. These days, video games appeal to a fairly broad audience. That's because they have structure, pacing, and celebration of achievements built into them. Real life kind of doesn't, once you get out of school, in my experience.
For example, in video games you typically have a statistics sheet you can reference at any point. This sheet tells you important information about your situation and yourself. For example, you might have a species (human) and a class or job (writer). It might list your most prominent skills (pattern recognition) or your affiliations and reputations with various entities (unknown cat level supporter of ASAN). You might also have physical statistics, like an intelligence score or a strength score. The sheet may also tell you whether you're suffering from conditions, like the the flu. It may even tell you how your stats are affected by that condition.
All of this info is highly useful and lets people plan more precisely for future challenges. And while I've tried to make real life examples during my explanation, there is no equivalent in real life for a character sheet. The closest thing I can think of is a resume or a CV, and those are as much about posturing as they are about reality.
I've tried various apps for mental health at this point, and I can attest to the "sky-high attrition rates" mentioned regarding most mental health apps. In plainspeak: people tend to start with mental health apps, but don't keep using them day after day or week after week, which is what you kind of need to do if you're going to change habits and benefit in the long term.
In my particular case, it was either that I wasn't seeing anything new or useful come out of my efforts of using the app, or I simply forgot and continued forgetting as time went by. I have a bachelor's degree in psychology and have been in therapy for like 5 years, so it's not like the information conveyed in most of these apps is going to be super new and riveting. But, there is always room for improvement, so it's not out of the realm of possibility that I'd benefit from these apps.
At any rate, I gave the one in this article a try, after realizing it's kind of weird to find your mental health apps by way of scientific research. It's based around the Big Five theory of personality that's popular now, but it tries to teach you how to communicate better. Which is valuable, since, y'know, I'm autistic over here.
There wasn't enough app to make a proper Friday review of it, but I can safely say that I would have kept playing if I hadn't run out of content. Actually, I burned through all the content in a single afternoon. So I guess I need more pacing in my life anyway. It would have been smarter to play a level a day or something like that.
(Pst! If you like seeing the latest autism-relevant research, visit my Twitter, which has links and brief comments on studies that were interesting, but didn't get a whole Reading the Research article about them.)
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