ProjectProposal-JacekWnuk

From CS 160 Fall 2008

Mental Health Examination

This game is meant to help a psychiatrist diagnose and/or help a patient of a mental illness.

Target User Group

The target user group would be the community of people with mental issues or illnesses of a wide variety, as well as the people trying to help them and study their illnesses, such as psychiatrists and psychologists.

Problem Description

Mental illnesses have existed for as long as humanity and its physical illnesses have existed. Most physical illnesses have a systematic approach to curing them, and people understand what to do; however, mental illnesses are still ill-understood by the public and often those having or even helping cure them.

Problem Context and Forces

According to the National Institute of Mental Health, an estimated 26.2 percent of adults in America suffer from a diagnosable mental disorder in any given year. This translates to around 57.7 million people given the 2004 U.S. census data. Thus there is clearly a demand for help with mental issues, and while there are plenty of different tests that can be used to test a patient and figure out exactly what the ailment entails, mental issues are still poorly understood and this battery of tests can be very taxing on all involved. Moreover, each of these tests have situations in which they apply and situations in which they are not useful, something that professionals must be trained in and the ordinary sick person will have difficulty understanding.

Solution Sketch

This game should gradually test the player using a variety of available psychological tests and provide those in a position to help the results. There are a variety of possibilities with the interface - it could be a text-input in which the next test is chosen then by the computer based on past responses or it could be still controlled somewhat (behind-the-scenes, albeit) by a human psychologist. Below pictured are three potential screens of a text-based adventure game in which one stumbles across situations such as this that force the player to make judgements that may be different based on their mental state, and will guide the course of the game, gathering more points the more mentally healthy the responses seem to be.