Manage stress better and improve your mental health
POD Adventures is designed and tailored for young people
POD Adventures is a smartphone based-game that teaches problem-solving skills through interactive animated stories, skill-based mini-games and quizzes. Personalized action plans are created by the user to help apply problem-solving skills to real-life problems and situations with support and encouragement from an in-game guide.
Identify your Problems
Find Options to solve them
Do it!
Apply the skills you learn
Learn skills to solve problems now and in the future
This game is ideally for adolescents aged 13-19 who are facing problems and/or stress and would like help. POD Adventures aims to help them develop problem solving skills so that they can manage their problems and feel better, and also apply these skills to any problems they may experience in the future.
Problem solving is one of the most widely used elements in evidence-based psychological interventions for children and adolescents globally.
POD Adventures was collaboratively designed by young people and our team of mental health experts, researchers and game designers. It is a guided app intended for use in schools (with guidance from a counsellor/guide) or by young people in their own time (with support from a counsellor/guide or on their own).
A school-based pilot study of POD Adventures in India indicated that young people found POD Adventures helpful in managing their problems and stress and improving their mental health.
Our pilot study
An app-based guided problem-solving intervention for adolescent mental health: A pilot cohort study in Indian schools. (URL https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33208507/)
Our design process
Design and development of the ‘POD Adventures’ smartphone game: A blended problem-solving intervention for adolescent mental health in India (URL https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31508404/)
Evidence-based game built with researchers and clinicians
POSITIVE CLINICAL OUTCOMES
Reduction in problem severity and mental health symptoms at
4 and 12 weeks
HIGH ENGAGEMENT
93%
of students completed the app
HIGH SATISFACTION
95%
of students rated programme as excellent or good
97%
of students said it helped to solve their problem(s)
Reference: Gonsalves et al 2020
EFFICIENT USE OF COUNSELLOR TIME
The entire intervention takes
10 minutes
of counsellor time per student
Guided digital interventions can reduce reliance on mental health professionals
Why a game?
Digital games offer a novel and interactive way of learning. Providing effective mental health treatments is a big global mental health challenge, especially in places where there is a shortage of trained mental health professionals and services.
Research shows that guided digital interventions can be as effective as face-to-face therapy and can help reduce the reliance on mental health professionals as they can be delivered with minimal support, often only requiring basic training on the intervention itself.
POD Adventures was designed specifically for use in low resource settings. It uses a resource-efficient format that can deliver an evidence-based mental health intervention to a large number of young people(at no cost to participants).
POD Adventures is designed to be engaging and easy-to-use
The problems I wrote are not affecting me in my life anymore, so now if I get a problem I think of myself as a POD master! I realised that there are options in life and we have gone through that…to test one of them and which is the best so we can just try out them.
Feedback from participant (Reference)
After seeing the story I came to know what was happening with me too, that it was the same thing, almost the same situation that was happening related to bullying and all. I had the same problem, so I figured out how to get help and so everything has become good now.
Feedback from participant (Reference)
About us
POD Adventures was developed as part of Sangath’s PRIDE research programme which aims to establish a suite of transdiagnostic psychological interventions organized around a stepped care system in Indian secondary schools.
Behind the POD Adventures app is a team of dedicated researchers and clinicians from Sangath (India), Harvard Medical School (USA), University of Sussex (UK) and London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (LSHTM). POD Adventures was designed by game designers from Quicksand Design Studio (India). This project was supported through funding from the Wellcome Trust.
Contact Us
For further information about POD Adventures, you can write to contactus@sangath.in