How a mobile phone game is helping teens deal with the trauma of war

Boston Globe

06-05-2025

The idea for the app came out of work by a team of psychologists and psychotherapists in Norway who developed a paper-based game they used to role-play with struggling teens in that country. In
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'We found very good results with an analog version of this game,' said clinical psychologist Solfrid Raknes, who helped design the game. That got the team thinking 'making it into an interactive [mobile] game would really be more scalable.'
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A core principle of
The Helping Hand game includes scenarios such as talking with a fictional friend who is depressed or having trouble with a parent. The game offers multiple conversational prompts the player can choose from to help the fictional friend and learn which responses are most effective.
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A screenshot from Helping Hand, a mobile game developed in Boston based on trauma-reduction techniques from psychology.
Courtesy of Attensi
The firm has created versions in Arabic for refugee kids from Syria as well as a Ukrainian version for adolescents in that war zone.
Attensi's scenario writers were used to learning about business situations but had to reach a higher level of empathy to construct the Helping Hand game, said Huw Newton-Hill, general manager of North America at the firm.
'A lot of our writers did actually travel to go experience some of what they were writing about, but there's no way they can really internalize that experience,' Newton-Hill said. 'People who can bring a story to life, bring characters to life, within such difficult contexts [are] really powerful.'
Another challenge making the game was ensuring it could run on older, slower phones and tablets in use among the kids in refugee communities, Newton-Hill said. The team had to shrink the size of files while making sure the characters in the game still came across as realistic.
All of the findings
so far show that the mobile game is even more effective than the old paper versions, Raknes said. With Syrian refugee kids, 85 percent said they were feeling symptoms of anxiety and depression before playing. After 10 sessions of the game, only 15 percent reported such signs.
'For adolescents today, it is easier to create engagement from an interactive game than from handing out a booklet and asking them to read something,' she said.
Aaron Pressman can be reached at