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“You Write Your Own Story”: Design Implications for an Interactive Narrative Authoring Tool to Support Reflection for Mental Health in College Students

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Interactive Storytelling (ICIDS 2021)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNISA,volume 13138))

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Abstract

Mental health therapy often involves the 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 extracted themes detailing their experiences in order to extract aims and implications for the design of a life narrative authoring tool for mental health.

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Acknowledgements

We thank Tristan Funicelli for his assistance in designing the interviews, running the initial studies, and conducting the initial analysis.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Florida, Gainesville, FL, 32611, USA

    Sarah Anne Brown & Sharon Lynn Chu

  2. Embodied Learning and Experience (ELX) Lab, Gainesville, USA

    Sarah Anne Brown & Sharon Lynn Chu

Authors
  1. Sarah Anne Brown
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  2. Sharon Lynn Chu
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Sarah Anne Brown .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. National University of Singapore, Singapore, Singapore

    Alex Mitchell

  2. Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

    Mirjam Vosmeer

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Brown, S.A., Chu, S.L. (2021). “You Write Your Own Story”: Design Implications for an Interactive Narrative Authoring Tool to Support Reflection for Mental Health in College Students. In: Mitchell, A., Vosmeer, M. (eds) Interactive Storytelling. ICIDS 2021. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 13138. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-92300-6_30

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-92300-6_30

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-030-92299-3

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-030-92300-6

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