NICOLET. The organization La Passerelle, an association of families and friends of people with mental illness, has created an immersive puzzle game to raise awareness of mental illness among adolescents and young adults. This is an innovative project launched at the beginning of last October.
The game, entitled “Mysteries of the Mind”, aims to raise participants’ awareness of the realities of mental illness by immersing them in a series of puzzles to be solved as a team. La Passerelle wanted to create a space where learning is done in a fun and collaborative way, while addressing delicate subjects.
By relying on its numerous youth partners, La Passerelle wishes to provide this unique experience to young people using community resources in the region and also hopes to establish partnerships with schools and youth centers. By offering this project to young people aged 12 to 29, “The Mysteries of the Mind” aspires to break the taboos surrounding mental health and better equip the new generation with essential knowledge on the subject.
The design
Sara Guilbault Boudreau, youth worker for La Passerelle, began working as an awareness agent by organizing games for young people. “At one point, our assistant, who loves escape games, said to herself that there was perhaps a way to integrate awareness into this type of activity! », says Ms. Guilbault Boudreau.
La Passerelle therefore contacted Défi-Évasion, a company expert in creating puzzle games, which offers the service of creating tailor-made and entirely personalized projects. By combining everyone’s expertise, both in mental health and in escape challenges, they were able to create “The Mysteries of the Mind”.
Much more than puzzles, the game helps raise awareness among participants through the sharing of knowledge, for example the impacts that mental illness can have on loved ones. There are six variations of the game which each deal with a mental health problem for which you must determine the diagnosis using five puzzles: bipolarity, borderline personality disorder, obsessive compulsive disorder, depression, anxiety disorder and schizophrenia.
“We are explorers of the mind, and our mission is to find the lost diagnosis. So it’s about diving into the mind, analyzing the symptoms and inspecting the clues to find what’s behind it! », concludes Ms. Guilbault Boudreau.
