16-year-old student creates LIFTnow in Minecraft as a game for treating insomnia
Varun Thvar wants to educate people about how they can get treatment for insomnia. That isn’t news, but Thvar is a 16-year-old student who has a unique approach to the problem: video games.
Thvar is releasing a game within the popular Minecraft platform that teaches people how to take care of themselves when it comes to dealing with the condition. Thvar calls it LIFTnow, which uses Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy for Insomnia (CBT-i) techniques to educate people.
He got the idea for it a couple of years ago, and sought counsel from the Department of Psychiatry at Stanford University Medical School.
“The thought is to combine existing mental health ideas with video games to create a new very effective and familiar engagenent for treatment,” Thvar said.
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Thvar said that the inspiration came to him about his mother became critically ill and he couldn’t sleep for a time. He said his brother and he got through difficult months in part by playing a lot of video games together.
“We spent a lot of time on Minecraft and Pokemon, and I played various mobile games and we felt a lot better through video games,” he said. “It felt it was more of an escape from reality. And after this, thankfully, my mom got better. After this, I came to a realization that games could be used as a way to improve mental health since they can reach large audiences, especially people without resources for direct treatments like therapy. Games also address stigma on mental health since it’s private and it doesn’t involve going somewhere for
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