ReachOut Central

As an online program for people aged 16-25, ReachOut Central is an informative tool to identify and prevent future mental health dilemmas. Young adults who are already struggling with mental health issues can also use the game as a secondary prevention source to understand, and ultimately overcome, their mental health problems.

In 2005, ReachOut launched the first version of its interactive online game, publicizing its services to Australian youth through advertisements on taxis and billboards, word of mouth spread by local school health professionals and youth centers, and through newspaper/magazine articles. The organization also attracts youth to its website through social networking services. Like most online gaming websites, ReachOut Central requires participants to join the broader ReachOut host service before becoming eligible to play, connecting new users to ReachOut's other youth services and mental health programs.

Participants of ReachOut Central take on the role of a game character who has just moved into a new town, and they learn to integrate the character that they are controlling into the community, making new friends along the way. Players interact with a fixed set of characters, including major characters, minor ones, and extras. The game also includes a coach/narrator, who is always available to offer advice to a player if he/she runs into a difficult scenario, and incorporates role-playing situations to promote the development of a user's problem-solving skills.

Eligible participants (18-25 year old Australian residents) completed a pre-program survey which included a set of sociodemographic questions, which included questions on alcohol related tendencies (AUDIT), coping strategies (CSI), levels of psychological distress (K10), resilience (RS), satisfaction with life (SWLS), and questions "regarding mental health literacy, stigma, help-seeking, and program satisfaction." Each set of questions was based on a unique point scale, which allowed researchers to tabulate subject response data quantitatively. Study participants then began a four-week period of access to the ReachOut Central gaming service, after which they completed another set of survey questions. Participants completed the same survey two months later as a follow-up to the post-program evaluation.

The goal of ReachOut Central (ROC) is to improve mental health among young people through an online gaming service by teaching them the practical coping skills for dealing with major stressors in life, ranging from issues such as alcohol use to psychological distress.

The aggregate results of this statistical analysis point to ReachOut Central's potential to impact and improve certain factors, such as coping ability, but also to relatively unexplored gender-dependent outcomes for other factors like alcohol consumption.

Researchers began with a single eligible subject pool (N=266), and used three temporally distinct online surveys (pre-program, post-program, and two-month follow-up) to assess the outcomes of the program. To account for drop-outs at any of these interview stages (154 responding subjects at post-program, and 100 responding subjects at the two-month follow-up), investigators used intent-to-treat analysis within their ANOVA-based statistical examination method.

Survey results were based on participant responses to five broad parameters (AUDIT, CSI, K10, RS, SWLS), which correspond to alcohol use, coping ability, psychological distress, resilience, and satisfaction with life measures respectively. One-sided ANOVA analyses were used to measure mean differences between genders, and the results were surprisingly mixed. The AUDIT results revealed significant gender differences at post-program (p=0.01), and at follow-up (p=0.03), indicating a higher alcohol use by males at both stages compared to females. A similar gender effect was seen in the K10 results, with (p=0.00) at post-program and (p=0.00) at follow-up, suggesting that females showed higher levels of psychological distress at both time points than males. Notable time-effect outcomes occurred for several of the criteria, including the CSI-PS, with post-program (p=0.04) and follow-up (p=0.03) data indicating an increase in problem solving skills for both males and females over time.