Congratulations to Sarah Brown and Dr. Sharon Lynn Chu for their paper, “You Write Your Own Story”: Design Implications for an Interactive Narrative Authoring Tool to Support Reflection for Mental Health in College Students, being accepted to the 2021 International Conference on Interactive Digital Storytelling (ICIDS)! See the abstract below:

Mental health therapy often involves the review, reflection, and reconstruction of one’s life narrative. However, few, if any existing digital interventions support a narrative-oriented therapeutic reflective process. College students may benefit from a digital support for mental health therapy, as they often need accessible, self-help ways for mental health support and are at a stage of life when their narratives are in flux. We propose the use of interactive story authoring to facilitate the process of reflection in college students to support their mental health, as it could guide them in independently externalizing and restructuring their life narratives, which are inherently non-linear. We conducted an interview study with college students and college counselors, and mapped themes detailing their experiences in order to extract aims and implications for the design of a life narrative authoring tool for mental health.

Congratulations to Sarah and Dr. Chu!