Online Game, Therapy for Troubled Youths

Reach Out Central, Australian youth welfare group, is using an online game to help troubled young people. Young people age 16-25 are using this online role-playing game to “test-drive life.”

The Inspire foundation, champion of Reach Out Central, hopes that helping and befriending the computer-controlled characters that inhabit the online world will transfer into real life social skills for young gamers.

“The purpose of the game is to build social standing with other characters and progress through the storyline, and to do that and progress well you have to maintain your own happiness, maintain self-confidence and you have to have physical energy,” Nicholas said.

The game is a cool, fun alternative to pamphlets to engage youth.

“[Reach Out Central] should be a place where young people want to go, rather than the classic educational games that may be good for you but you didn’t particularly enjoy,” he said.

Mark Rosser, senior program manager for youth at national depression initiative beyondblue, sites statically one in five young people suffer from depression each year. Fewer than 40 per cent of them actually went on to seek help. However, a survey of young Australians by Mission Australia last year found that young people were twice as likely to go online than contact a counselor, teacher, doctor, minister or youth worker, and three to six times more likely to go online than call a telephone hotline.

“Young people are online, we know that they’re high consumers of the digital age, so we need to get our messages and we need to interact with young people online – that’s a given,” he said.

via Stuff.co.nz