Find out more here about the project background, aims, and what the study will look like.

Is SPARX a game?

SPARX looks like a game, but it is a self-help tool for young people with mild to moderate depression.

At the beginning of each level, you meet the Guide who talks to you about real life and what you will learn.

You enter a portal into the ‘game world’ where you will learn and practice skills. After that, the Guide helps you work out how to use those skills in real life. There are seven levels in total.

Therefore, SPARX may have the look and feel of a game, but it is a useful tool to help with low mood.

How does it work?

SPARX uses therapeutic skills in a game like way. Instead of learning new ways of doing things from reading a book, or talking with someone in therapy, SPARX uses fun and active learning strategies that you can practise safely in the game setting.

The type of therapy used in SPARX is called Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT). CBT helps support people with depression and anxiety and is one of the main recommended interventions for people with depression.

What is depression?

Everyone goes through tough times where we feel sad or down. It can be triggered by an event like dealing with stress, disappointments in life or grief but sometimes there is no noticeable trigger.

Here are some signs that you, or someone you know, might be depressed:

• Feeling down, sad, or depressed and not enjoying things you used to enjoy
• These negative feelings last for most of the day, almost every day for at least a couple of weeks
• These negative feelings are getting in the way of normal everyday life, school, family or working life

If you are having negative feelings because of something sad happening to you, find someone you can talk to who can help. This could be a friend, family member, a health professional, or an adult you can trust.

Sometimes if our physical health is poor (like when our body lacks important nutrients), this can make us have no energy and feel bad too. Chat with your doctor if you think your physical health might be making you feel bad. You can also have no energy and feel bad for other reasons – like an illness or another health issue. You can check this out with a health professional.

Why are we doing this research trial?

Many young people with depression in the UK currently get no access or are on very long waiting lists for behavioural therapy, such as CBT. A way to overcome this is by using self-help digital interventions. These have shown to be useful for young people and adults for a range of mental health conditions. One such intervention is called SPARX, which has showed promising findings in helping young people with their low mood in New Zealand and other countries. However, it has not yet been studied with young people in the UK so we don’t know if it would be equally useful here.

Before we can conduct a large randomised controlled trial, we first need to see if it is feasible. That’s why we are carrying out a feasibility trial to see if we should proceed further, and if so, how.

What are our research questions?

The findings from this study will help us to further develop SPARX that will hopefully allow more young people to benefit from evidence-based interventions. This is a feasibility study (a practice-run before doing a large-scale study). It will help us find out more about: 

1. We want to know how helpful young people with depression find the additional support; and how we can improve the support and SPARX going forward.

2. We want to find out if young people who have depression find this type of trial acceptable and whether they are willing to be randomly allocated to receive SPARX; or to be put on a waiting list.

3. Whether young people taking part can complete the questionnaires we plan to use, without difficulty.

4. To estimate how many young people we will need to recruit for the larger trial.

We can then implement these changes before we do a larger study and we need to ensure that research meets patient needs.

Important

If you are having any thoughts about hurting or killing yourself, you need to reach out and talk with someone who is trained to help right now: Call 999 or visit your local A&E department if you or someone else might be unsafe right now.

Remember you are not alone, there is always someone to talk with and life does get better.