<\/p>\n
Dungeons and Dragons \u2014 Maybe you grew up playing Dungeons and Dragons. Maybe you think it’s uncool. Perhaps you came across this movie through the hit show Stranger Things. Or maybe you’re currently actively involved in a Dungeons and Dragons (D&D) campaign. Today on A Public Affair, Louisville-based mental health clinic OCD & Anxiety Colorado uses D&D to help children and youth with anxiety, ADHD, obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), and other mental health diagnoses.<\/p>\n
D&D was invented in the 1970s. A fantasy tabletop role-playing game. It is facilitated by the Dungeon Master or Game Master. It’s the person who tells the story, helps create all the details of the fantasy world, and guides the action. Basically, a bunch of people sit around a table, play different roles, and imagine a story together. Use a set of parameters for what your character can do and how. However, it is the player who invents their own character, comes up with their backstory, and makes decisions throughout the story as that character.<\/p>\n
Clinician Paige Wyman is a Licensed Social Worker (LSW) and Board Certified Assistant Behavior Analyst (BCaBA). She is certified as a \u201cTherapeutic Game Master\u201d through the Game to Grow approach.<\/p>\n
“The idea is that you want to tell your friends a fun story where cool things happen,” says Wyman. “And sometimes you’ll need to take on a different role.” That role could be a more advanced version of yourself, or it could be a completely different version of yourself.<\/p>\n
“The idea is that you get to play and explore these things that you don’t get to explore a lot in real life, and then work together in groups to tell stories collaboratively,” she explained.<\/p>\n
The basis of their approach is something called Exposure Response Prevention Therapy (ERP). The International OCD Foundation defines it as the practice of confronting thoughts, images, objects, and situations that cause anxiety and cause obsessions.<\/p>\n
In Anxie-D&D, Wyman takes the player’s “content” – what each child is trying to engage in therapy – and incorporates it into the game, allowing the children to confront it in a safe environment.<\/p>\n
“Some people were scared of bugs, so we made the soup tender (we called it ‘soup tender’, not bartender, to be friendly to all ages) a giant cockroach man. And they had to talk to the giant cockroach man in order to advance the story and get the information they needed. \u201d<\/p>\n
It was difficult for the players at first, but they were able to do it, Wyman said. And in the end, “they were like, ‘Oh, he’s going to be fine.'”<\/p>\n
Or maybe your child lacks self-confidence. Wyman puts characters in situations where they have to solve puzzles on behalf of a group. That character is the only one in the group with the right strengths (e.g., a high Wisdom score) to solve that puzzle and advance the story.<\/p>\n
The Game to Grow method that Page uses was co-developed by Virginia Spielman, an occupational therapist based in Centennial, Colorado. Her organization, STAR Institute for Sensory Processing, also runs a Game to Grow D&D campaign for kids, both in-person and online. He said they have trained thousands of facilitators in this technique and estimate that about 1,000 certified game masters are currently actively implementing these programs with groups of children in therapeutic settings, community settings such as libraries, and adult groups, including veterans groups. The group spans the United States, Canada, Hong Kong, Australia and the United Kingdom.<\/p>\n
D&D has probably always helped neurodivergent kids for as long as it has existed. Spielman said she got the job after noticing that her 9-year-old son, who struggled with anxiety at school, completely opened up while playing Dungeons and Dragons. She found that his D&D character handled setbacks well and celebrated his successes with confidence. And formalizing things like this can be a good way to go for older kids who have a hard time getting permission to “pretend.”<\/p>\n
OCD & Anxiety Colorado was founded relatively recently, about a year ago. Ally Garza, LCSW founder and senior clinician, grew up in Superior. She founded the clinic to serve the needs of children who grew up just like her.<\/p>\n
“I spent my entire adolescence being misdiagnosed with OCD and going untreated. It wasn’t until I became a clinician at age 25 that I learned that I actually had OCD and what evidence-based treatments were available,” Garza said. “At that point, I had been receiving treatment in Boulder County for years and years and years, and it felt like no matter what I did, my symptoms were actually getting worse, and I thought there was something wrong with me, that I wasn’t trying hard enough.”<\/p>\n
Garza says this is a common experience for children and young people with OCD. By the age of 25, she was bedridden, unable to eat and afraid to drink water. Although she didn’t leave her home, she received treatment for OCD at her residence, which she says saved her life.<\/p>\n
She then spent many years working in various high-level OCD care programs across the country. When she returned to Colorado, she worked at Anschutz University’s OCD clinic, where she says she repeatedly witnessed the program denying children, especially those on Medicaid, the more advanced OCD care they needed.<\/p>\n
\u201cI found that nothing had changed since I left when it came to treatment programs and treatment options for pediatric OCD,\u201d Garza said. That’s why she founded OCD & Anxiety Colorado.<\/p>\n
Still, children who need a higher level of care may need to be referred to specialists in other states. And Garza ran into a Medicaid roadblock that prevented him from doing so.<\/p>\n
The International OCD Foundation recently released a report on OCD treatment in the United States. According to the report, 81% to 98% of OCD patients do not receive effective evidence-based treatment, and only 2% of OCD patients receive exposure-response prevention therapy, the gold standard for OCD treatment. It also said that on average it takes seven years for patients to receive evidence-based treatment.<\/p>\n
Earlier this year, Garza sent a letter to Colorado state lawmakers asking them to address the barriers that prevent children with OCD on Medicaid from getting the treatment they need. In her letter, she said, “Without access to a more advanced level of evidence-based OCD care in Colorado Medicaid, clinicians are routinely forced to connect outpatient levels of care to children who cannot eat, sleep, or leave their homes. These cases are not uncommon, they are the norm.”<\/p>\n
This article aired on KGNU’s weekday morning show “A Public Affair,” which features in-depth discussions of local news issues. Click here to listen to other episodes of “A Public Affair.”<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n
#AnxieDD #mental #health #clinics #Dungeons #Dragons #therapy<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Dungeons and Dragons \u2014 Maybe you grew up playing Dungeons and Dragons. Maybe you think it’s uncool. Perhaps you came across this movie through the hit show Stranger Things. Or maybe you’re currently actively involved in a Dungeons and Dragons (D&D) campaign. Today on A Public Affair, Louisville-based mental health clinic OCD & Anxiety Colorado … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":436,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1,3],"tags":[1742,1743,1745,1744,36,35,1116],"class_list":["post-435","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-general","category-mental-health","tag-anxiedd","tag-clinics","tag-dragons","tag-dungeons","tag-health","tag-mental","tag-therapy"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/golliza.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/435","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/golliza.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/golliza.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/golliza.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/golliza.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=435"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/golliza.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/435\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/golliza.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/436"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/golliza.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=435"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/golliza.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=435"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/golliza.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=435"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}