"I Kind of Bounce off It": Translating Mental Health Principles into Real Life Through Story-Based Text Messages

Abstract

Adopting new psychological strategies to improve mental wellness can be challenging since people are often unable to anticipate how new habits are applicable to their circumstances. Narrative-based interventions have the potential to alleviate this burden by illustrating psychological principles in an applied context. In this work, we explore how stories can be delivered via the ubiquitous and scalable medium of text messaging. Through formative work consisting of interviews and focus group discussions with 15 participants, we identified desirable elements of stories about mental health, including authenticity and relatability. We then deployed story-based text messages to 42 participants to explore challenges regarding both the stories' content (e.g., specific versus generalized) and format (e.g., story length). We observed that our stories helped participants reflect on and identify flaws in their thinking patterns. Our findings highlight design implications and opportunities for mental wellness interventions that utilize stories in text messaging services.

Keywords: cognitive distortions; mental health; narrative intervention; stories; text messages.

Fig. 1.

Illustrations of how participants would receive stories under (a) Up-Front Choice format and (b) Start and Switch-Out format. For the Start and Switch-Out format, participants would receive the first few messages of the story before being asked if they wanted to see the rest of it.

Fig. 2.

The (a) long and (b) short versions of the story involving the cognitive distortion of overgeneralization.