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Computer Game Designed To Treat Depression As Effective As Traditional Treatment
New submitter sirlark writes "'Researchers at the University of Auckland tested an interactive 3D fantasy game called Sparx on a 94 youngsters diagnosed with depression whose average age was 15 and a half. Sparx invites a user to take on a series of seven challenges over four to seven weeks in which an avatar has to learn to deal with anger and hurt feelings and swap negative thoughts for helpful ones. Used for three months, Sparx was at least as effective as face-to-face conventional counselling, according to several depression rating scales. In addition, 44% of the Sparx group who carried out at least four of the seven challenges recovered completely. In the conventional treatment group, only 26% recovered fully.' One has to wonder if it's Sparx specifically — or gaming in general — that provides the most benefit, given that most of the symptoms of depression relate to a feeling of being unable to influence one's environment (powerlessness, helplessness, ennui, etc) and games are specifically designed to make one feel powerful but challenged (if they hit the sweet spot)."
Anyone? It's coming. Pretty soon our actions in video games will contribute to the profile built on our web habits. Fun fun fun.
Won't work outside the lab. As soon as they release it to market and pump it full of DRM and premium-content-ads, they'll get depressed all over again.
you've not had depression, then.
" One has to wonder if it's Sparx specifically — or gaming in general — that provides the most benefit, given that most of the symptoms of depression relate to a feeling of being unable to influence one's environment (powerlessness, helplessness, ennui, etc) and games are specifically designed to make one feel powerful but challenged (if they hit the sweet spot)."
The thing a lot of people especially in the age group tested lack are the emotional tools to deal with normal feelings such as anger and depression. One on one counseling helps the patient build those tools and if the game is designed with that in mind then yes it's Sparx not all games. If it were all video games that made a person feel empowered then I really doubt EMO would have ever been "invented".
"Ubuntu" -- an African word, meaning "Slackware is too hard for me". - stolen from Dan C alt.os.linux.slackware
Playing WoW when I was depressed was the most helpful thin, actually. I really didn't even want to talk to other people. Talking about it would have just made me feel worse and hopeless. The reward feeback system in the game made me feel good about myself, as I was able to achieve goals, play with friends, help newbies out, and win loot. I still worked, tried to be social, and got a little exercise, so I don't think it should be taken to the extreme like in South Park.
However, I'm sure any number of real life activities could replace a game. Good thing about games are that you can play them any time of day, you don't really have to rely on other people, and your dexterity doesn't have to be great so you can be drunk and/or high and not really risk getting into trouble.
Depression can't be cured. It can be treated, very effectively, and the outcome will last a long time. But once you've had a depressive episode, you are more likely to have another. The longer and more severe the symptoms, the more likely you are to have a recurrance. Whatever it is that triggers depression can be abated, but it weakens the psychological fabric of the person it afflicts, permanently.
I don't know why this is, or the underlying mechanic. There are many studies out that identify variances in neural activity and neurotransmitter levels that are associated with people having a depressive episode; It has a distinct pathology and has definate biological markers, unlike most personality disorders (as a contrast). But there is scant data on what differences persist in the brain post-recovery... only a marked increase in the odds of relapse.
In that respect, it is much like chicken pox. If you've had it, the virus remains in your body, and for 80% of the population, after the acute infection, there are no further symptoms for the rest of their life. But for some, complications arise in the form of shingles. Depression is like that as well, but without the pathogen -- once you've had it, something is changed in you, forever.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
Looks like it to me:
- "In addition, 44% of the Sparx group who carried out at least four of the seven challenges recovered completely."
- "In the conventional treatment group, only 26% recovered fully."
This seems to indicate high effectiveness of the Sparx treatment, yet it actually tells us absolutely nothing. The critically missing data is how many of the Sparx group completed four or more challenges. If it was 1%, them the overall effectiveness of Sparx may be as low as 0.44% and vastly lower than conventional treatment. If it was 100%, then Sparx has a 44% success rate and is vastly better than conventional treatment.
Either someone is intentionally lying here (remember, these people are psychologists and know how to do it) or the reporter is a nil-whit without a clue on how to report statistics.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
You seem to be thinking of mild depression or even subclinical sadness. This is quite common, as psychiatric disorders tend to be an exaggeration of normal things that everyone feels, so it's easy to underestimate them. You also rarely see them, as holding a job and going out requires a fair degree of psychological health. The last hundred years or so of medical research specifically tests for effectiveness VS a placebo, so it's not like people are just shooting in the dark here. (To throw you a bone, medications don't seem to be very effective against mild depression.) Most of the people I've talked to keep struggling with depression throughout their life and getting treatment means getting better in weeks/months rather than years.
Also, stop getting your medical knowledge from TV, it's wrong. The vast majority of psychologists don't do the couch thing anymore. Plus, CBT (the most common type) isn't really talking about one's feelings at length. If I remember my history right, that sort of therapy died out as psychology progressed beyond Freud. There are likely a few psychologists that still do it, but they cater to rich people with similar misconceptions (it requires almost weekly visits for years before you see significant results -- assuming the psychologist doesn't incorporate newer forms of therapy).
LOLWAT.
Actually, depression and autism are useful for the species-as-a-whole. Sure, severe depression can be crippling -- but some depression is good for society. The pessimists are the ones who tend to see what's going to go wrong, problems with ideas. Worrying about every little thing, to a degree, means every little thing won't go wrong (some still will, but compare to cheery optimists who don't take time to prepare for unfortunate eventualities).
Autism is also a benefit to society, to a degree. Sure, it can be severe, and that's not helpful -- but good grief, go pick out any famous genius from the past, read up on how strange their behavior was. PROTIP: Some of our greatest advancements in knowledge and science came from the minds of people who had strange and inexplicable obsessive habits, who were not socially apt or adapt.
In short, you're pretty much an idiot lacking any understanding of the societal benefits of diversity.
These things persist in society precisely because they were useful.
Hemophilia? Not so much -- but it's rather rare, and ~1/3 of the cases of it aren't caused by genetic inheritance but rather from random gene mutation.
Diabetes? Not really genetic. There can be a genetic predisposition for it, but that doesn't really CAUSE it -- just makes it more likely to happen.
We've had thousands of years "left to nature" for undesirable traits that hinder survival to be weeded out. That these traits persist should be a pretty big fucking clue to you.
... still waiting for this free-as-in-beer free beer I keep hearing about.
I agree that this is a severe problem. Unfortunately, the only solutions brought forward to far are completely unacceptable.
Killing people with these diseases off, is obviously unacceptable.
Preventing them from breeding is highly problematic. To give one example, there was a couple in
Austria that recently had their third kid die horribly because they have a known genetic incompatibility and a very high chance of the child being horribly sick. Still, they inflicted this on a third person. There was no legal consequences of them breeding again. They did get convicted because the sickness is treatable today (not pretty), but they instead went for Homeopathy (which, predictably does nothing and the child dies in agony). Yes, even in this extreme case (and I see at least a double manslaughter here, after the first child they knew), nothing was done to prevent them from having more children. The problem are, of course, the various Eugenics programs, in particularly in the 3rd Reich.
Appealing to the insight may work with many, but there are far to many egoists out there for it to be effective.
On the other hand, humans breed like crazy, which causes far more pain, suffering and misery than the egoists that pass serious diseases down to their children. If left unchecked, the human will to reproduce is what may well kill off the human race. Only time will tell what happens. Many industrial nations are already shrinking, so some control mechanism is at work. It may well be that these sicknesses are part of that mechanism.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Would http://sparx.org.nz/ cheer you up?
Sadly, it's not out yet. They do say "We are hoping to make it available this year" but don't mention which year that was. I'm hoping they mean this year, and that they're still on track...
The actual study was from 2009 to 2010, it's just taken them this long to actually get published.
Paul "TBBle" Hampson
Paul.Hampson@Pobox.Com
You must be new here.
The cited article is not informative. Read the original source at http://www.bmj.com/content/344/bmj.e2598
It answers most of the questions in the comments.
You can view the trailer or learn more about the game as such at http://www.sparx.org.nz/
I am unhappy to see such a low-quality reference for this article, when the official press release from the journal is available and the full article itself are available online and
Most of the objections raised in the comments above are answered in the article, which looks to me to be about as high quality as is possible given the differences between the treatments used. Making accusations of "lying" before you have read the full article is unethical.
The main weakness pointed out by the authors was that the compliance with the treatment protocols was reported by the adolescent participants, not by the machines or the professionals providing the treatment. Another was that some 13% of the participants who were supposed to receive treatment as usual were merely put on waiting lists, although that may be treatment as usual in some places; but the real kicker here was that excluding them made the treatment as usual even less effective! There have been plenty of previous studies comparing treatment with non-treatment that find treatment more effective, but testing treatments for depression is very tricky because pretty much anything is beneficial, even telling people they are taking part in an experiment and then doing nothing else, but this article reports “[w]e have carried out two small studies of computerised interventions for depressive symptoms; one showed a significant effect compared with placebo and the other was significantly more effective than a waitlist control.”
I know it is futile to ask people to read an article before they comment on it, and I know it is equally futile to ask people who submit articles such as this to post links to original articles instead of second or third sources, but here goes: If you are submitting an article about an article in a scientific journal, please include a link to the original article in the original journal instead of a newspaper article based on a press release announcing the publication of the article. Thank you. And if you are drinking from the Firehose and come across something like this, at least vote it down, and better yet, submit a better article to replace it.
People should not fear their government. Governments should fear their people.
Perhaps you should read the entire article instead of basing your assinine accusation on the title of a newspaper article describing a journal article which, strangely enough, contains operational definitions for both "depression" and "treatment as usual".
People should not fear their government. Governments should fear their people.
For my money, this video game works as well as conventional counseling because conventional counseling doesn't work. People get better, sure, but they get better on their own. Time, improving life circumstances, and new friends are what end depression, not lying on a couch talking about your feelings.
Do you have anything to back this up, or are you making it up ... or just repeating cynical ignorance that I've heard 1,000 times before? The problem with repeating cynical ignorance is that you can spread misinformation to people who really need it. Next is anecdotal speculation about vaccine effectiveness?
I've been diagnosed with recurring depression and there is quite a lot of that in my family line (father is currently medicated after years long serious depression, etc.). There have been times I've been depressed and not went for treatment and there have been times I've went to a therapist... and there is a world of difference. Of course, depression affects individuals in different ways so everything I say might not apply to everyone but I'll try to speak on a relatively general level.
First of all... "Time, improving life circumstances, and new friends are what end depression"... Those aren't the kind of things that happen during a depression! When you can't force yourself to get into the job (a job you normally love, really want to keep, etc.) in time (or at all) for months and even if you get in, you can't concentrate enough to do anything complex (e.g., coding) efficiently... When you don't feel any interest to meet friends, girlfriend, etc... there's pretty high chance of getting fired, failing your classes, destroying your relationships, etc. which will make the depression deeper. Time might take care of it but if you allow that situation to go on for months first (untreated, my depression usually lasts about 4-5 months), you've probably nearly ruined your life first (been there, done that).
So, if you're depressed, not getting treatment is usually stupid. There are always medications but studies have shown that if you treat your depression with drugs, you're likely to get depressed again sooner and the next depression is likely to be deeper... until the medicines don't have enough effect anymore.
As for what happens in therapy... I've been to quite a few sessions and I've never had to talk about my childhood and whatnot. There are quite a few schools of therapy but Freudian, Jungian, etc. exist only in movies and as fashionable things to try out for the rich people. The therapist I usually go to helps me do damage control: Helps me take the steps that prevent me from ruining my life (Talk with my boss about my need to work at a reduced capacity for a while instead of me just not showing up for work half the time, etc.) at first and then helps me claw my way out of the pit (prioritize the massive bulk of tasks that seem impossible to handle, get small successes on which to build, etc.), helps me find the things that deepen my depression and find ways to solve them (Your home is filthy? You don't think you're going to lose your job immediately? Well, get a cleaner to visit it once a week until you're up and going again!... type of practical solutions)... Nothing magic but just things that you can't get done without help if you're depressed.
Left to nature, contra-survival traits like these weed themselves out in any population
Left to nature, I wouldn't be working a shit job with shitty hours stuck inside in a noisy hot office all day dealing with a workload you'd normally assign to three people and a boss you want to push out of a high window - a boss who has no problem texting you xmas morning expecting you to fix an internet access problem in one department. Nor would I be forced to stay in that job to pay the mortgage on the house that's underwater and unsellable due to recent subsidence. In a decent world, I'd be able to find another job except nobody is hiring at anything other than entry-level salaries in IT in my area (within a several hour commute range) and even those have 50+ applicants per post.
Glad to know I should be sterilized along with my wife, and my existing children should be killed to make sure I don't pollute the gene pool with my depression. Helpful.
Remember kids, it's all fun and games until someone commits wholesale galactic genocide.
I can totally relate to that. Any sufficiently challenging game, with a decent reward system, and "feel good about yourself" moments would do.
But then comes times like this year, when you have lots of work to do, a senior project to finish by a very short deadline, a shitty boss, and add one or two nasty incidents, and you suddenly find yourself lacking the time to get into any video game, but quite to the contrary, you start feeling guilty when playing instead of working on the project, and the depression crawls back into you.
So it boils down to helping your depression vs helping your life? A question that is depressing itself :(
my sig pwns your sig
especially since I now have something to point people towards who are trapped in the "computer games are evil and make you want to go out and shoot people" mindset
I think you're putting too much faith in them. No matter what you show them, they're probably going to continue to believe that video games are evil, porn is evil, that both hurt kids, etc. Even if it's all nonsense.
Odd, my experience is a completely different one.
Getting better with a depression is quite impossible. For a simple reason: A depression is self fueling. They don't get better by themselves, they get worse. Usually by the time someone finally decides that it's time to see a doctor they're already so deep in the hole that digging out becomes a time consuming process.
A depression isn't just a mood swing that passes. Your loved one leaves you and you are heartbroken. That's no depression. It can lead to one, but any "normal" person will grief and cry for a while, then get over it and go on with their life. That has nothing to do with a depression.
A depression festers. And grows. You stop caring about yourself and you stop socializing. Which in turn means you will lose friends because even if they call you, you don't want to go out with them. Which leads to them not calling you anymore. Which deepens your depression. You notice that it gets harder and harder every day to drag your corpse to work, and not because you have a shitty, mind-numbing idiot job that ends with the phrase "you want fries with that?". You have a great job, it's your dream job, but it takes more and more willpower to even get out of bed in the morning. That you cannot sleep half the night because your mind is racing and you're worrying (often about things most people would consider trivial or nonsensical) doesn't make getting up any easier either. Which of course leads to your job suffering and, since it is a job you like, being bad at it doesn't really improve your mood either. In case you eventually get fired, that doesn't really help your mood either.
It's a downward spiral that never gets better. Never. It ends where even the things that put joy in your life, whatever your hobby might have been that you loved doing, don't mean anything to you anymore. When even doing this feels like a chore.
How the fuck is that supposed to get better in any way by itself?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Not at all. In fact, it's a very effective treatment for depression.
My therapist, also my cousin Freddie (aka Freddie the Chin, aka Chinmeister Fred, aka Tickle me I'm Fred), told me CBT stands for "Cocaine, Booze and Titty Bars". And in ongoing human trials he's conducted almost constantly since about 1992, Fred (aka Freddie Fun) reports that this modality is about (and I'm quoting from the journal article here) "A fuckin' million times better than the placebo, which by the way is Japanese porn on the computer. Also, a coupla Vicodin and ice cold schnapps don't hurt for takin' off the edge, you know?".
The thing that more traditional treatments fail to take into effect is that, you know, life sucks.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Your land obviously never won the Soccer World Cup...
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
To throw you a bone, medications don't seem to be very effective against mild depression.
Considering that SSRIs/SNRIs have a 60-70% incidence of causing sexual side effects (reduced libido, reduced sensation, reduced ability to reach orgasm) but are the most frequently prescribed class of antidepressant, it's not surprising. The side effects are enough to make anyone stay mildly depressed.
I've had it quite often myself, and I don't see why goodmanj got modded down for his statement. In fact for the longest time I blamed video games for making me more depressed, when it was actually the act of ceasing to play them that did so. Whoever wrote TFA really hit the nail on the head...at least for my case. It's all about feeling in control.
Problem is, to say "depression" is like saying "autism" or "cancer". So many varieties that no one solution works for all of them.
What's worked on mine is simple: I keep busy with regular projects, and give myself at least the illusion of control and accomplishment. May as well feel like I'm doing something while I'm hanging around.
Charisma is the measure of someone's ability to lie with a straight face.
It is NOT gaming in general. Gaming as a hobby, especially with a focus on challenge, encourages isolation, which is the kiss of death for mental health. The fact that a person is more powerful in games than the world isn't helpful either. At best it causes one to look behind the curtain too much; more commonly it simply generates a psychological dependence on escapism.
:p
I'm using a bunch of "psychobabble" here, but I should be clear: my years of experience are not in practice and study of the field. This happened to me, and I've known several others who got it worse. To be even clearer, I'm not saying that games are bad for you. In my best health, I enjoy them much more, in fact. Having a life in balance allows me to take on games that require more effort and which are deeper as works of art. But they are not good medicine unless they're made that way.
A further insight as a sort of... tenured mental patient: if the game teaches people to "replace thoughts," it's teaching Cognitive Behavioral Therapy. While that method has seen some success, it's mainly because most cases of depression frankly deal with first world problems that people need to bootstrap themselves out of. People with physiologically-rooted cases, those who have experienced severe trauma, and those who see the man behind the curtain will see better long-term gains from a newer approach: Acceptance and Committment Therapy. Luckily, there's already a game for that! A significant portion of ACT is the practice of mindfulness and meditation. Bejeweled 3's meditation mode is surprisingly effective for a silly gimmick.
There have been multiple studies about how excessive gaming can lead to depression, and even a behavioral addiction. While I'm sure that taking this position is going to be massively unpopular among the /. crowd, I've experienced both the depressive and addictive aspect of video games, myself. Of course, I still love gaming, but I've found that if I don't exert some control over how much I play, my depression gets worse, and yes, I do get addicted (complete with a sort of emotional "withdrawal" when I stop playing).
Here's a reference, though better ones are surely out there:
http://www.videogamingaddiction.com.au/how-to-avoid-video-game-addiction-depression/
That being said, it may well be the nature of the games I play: mostly ultra-violent FPS games, and a few RPGs (Skyrim, etc.). While it's surely also unpopular to remind people about the article on /. a while back about such games "turning-off" certain parts of the brain (especially the area that more-or-less monitors whether our actions are considered "acceptable;" I don't remember the name for it), I'll point the phenomenon out, anyway. Notably, other parts of the brain are stimulated in much the opposite way (motor cortex, etc.), and can find benefit therein. (Link contains a good info-graphic.)
http://ansonalex.com/infographics/effect-video-games-brain/
Don't take this as me saying "video games are evil," because I don't believe that. Still, misuse can be a problem and can actually cause episodes of depression, as I've experienced, myself.
These researchers have probably hit on something important, and it would seem that the nature of the game plays a major role in how it affects a person. Congrats to them for being sensible about studying these things (rather than basing their findings on ideology). I should probably point out that this article deals only with comparison to traditional "talk therapy"--which not everyone finds helpful (and whose efficacy is extremely dependent on who's doing it)--and that this probably isn't dealing with severe, chemical depression, so much as socially-induced depression (which is certainly just as valid; it's simply different). Still, that the program was this helpful is quite remarkable.
CBT -- Cognitive Behavioral Therapy is essentially mind hacking. Suppose you're afraid of snakes. In the old-style Freudian therapy you and your analyst would try to figure out how your childhood development led to that phobia. The CBT therapist isn't interested in where the phobia comes from, he's focused on how it works. He'll help you identify the unspoken assumptions and distorted thinking (that the cognitive part) that maintain your fear of snakes, then encourages you to put those ideas to the test by actually getting firsthand experience handling them (that's the behavioral part).
So the CBT approach is to break a mental problem down to its component assumptions and put each of those assumptions to an empirical test.
There's a similar therapy called "ACT" (Acceptance and Commitment Therapy). If your problem is that you think life sucks, a CBT therapist will approach that belief as a fallacy to be disproven. An ACT therapist would regard that feeling as part of the human condition that can't be banished, and focus on helping you learn to do rewarding and meaningful things despite feeling that way.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
They're the hardest ones to convince.
Agreed, and I probably wouldn't waste my time on them, except for some ridicule. I do think that humour is the best weapon against religion, and we need to ridicule it at every opportunity.
That's the more difficult one. With the amount of anti-sex nonsense in America, accurate studies probably cannot easily be performed to begin with.
Especially on children. Then again, it also means there are no studies to confirm it. Though, honestly, I do think that porn does have a negative effect on children and teenagers. Not because of the sex, but because the porn sex isn't anything like actual sex. More sexual openness and a more realistic depiction of it would be a great help.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
Try it for yourself: Moodgym is a website offering CBT for depression. It helped me better than my shiftless therapist managed to.
Go on. Try it. It beats sitting around in this place bitching about Apple and Microsoft.
Anyone who lists "euphoria" under "undesirable effects" is being intellectually dishonest. The reason ketamine is low on the list of drugs to treat depression with is puritanical bigotry connected to the war on drug users.
Also, I don't use ketamine. I'm not willing to get addicted and withdraw from half a dozen different drugs before a doctor finally does the right thing and prescribes a safe and effective treament instead of the politically correct treatment.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
Undesirable Effects: ...psychotomimetic phenomena (euphoria, dysphasia [speech impairment], blunted affect, psychomotor retardation, vivid dreams, nightmares, impaired attention, memory and judgement, illusions, hallucinations, altered body image), delirium, dizziness, diplopia [double vision], blurred vision, nystagmus [involuntary eye movement], altered hearing, hypertension [high blood pressure], tachycardia [too-rapid heartbeat], hypersalivation [drooling], nausea and vomiting, erythema [rash] and pain at injection site. Urinary tract toxicity...
We're not talking about "puritanical bigotry" or "politically correct" here. However, it looks like we might need to talk about your prejudices and unwillingness to accept inconvenient facts.
BTW, "euphoria" doesn't mean ''happy"; it means "*excessive or uncontrolled* feelings of happiness". And this can make you unable to concentrate or even careless to the point of doing something stupid or even dangerous. As someone who occasionally suffers from violent mood swings, I don't desire to be excessively or uncontrollably happy; I want to be happy in a *normal* way which I can control, thanks very much.
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.