Project Description
Challenge
Kids with autism commonly struggle to regulate their emotions and handle the day-to-day stressors in their lives. As a result, they run a higher risk of mental-health challenges such as depression, anxiety disorders and behavioural challenges. Despite this reality, most community-based services have limited mental health supports for autistic children.
Project Summary
Secret Agent Society (SAS) Small Group Program is a life skills program designed to help school-aged children with autism “crack the code” of emotions and social interactions. Delivered in a virtual or in-person group format, the SAS Small Group Program digital software provides fun espionage-themed activities and tools including a digital board game, role playing and a computer game to help autistic children learn new skills. It targets core areas of difficulty for kids with autism, such as developing desired friendships, working in teams, problem solving, recognizing emotions, expressing them in helpful ways and coping with negative ones.
In 2021 and 2022, Kids Brain Health Network-supported researchers partnered with autism services in the Toronto area to offer the Secret Agent Society to families. Parents and therapists reported being highly satisfied with the program, and the children who completed it tended to see improvements in their social and emotional skills.
However, to reach all the kids who need programs like Secret Agent Society, not only autism centres but also publicly funded mental-health and developmental-service centres should be able to offer them. That’s why the researchers would now like to train the frontline staff in those agencies to deliver the SAS Small Group Program. The investigators will measure child and parent outcomes and learn about how to support mental-health therapists and developmental-service staff in their efforts to improve the well-being of autistic kids.
In addition, they will work with French-speaking professionals and families to see what adaptations might be needed, if any, to make this intervention work well for them, too.
Looking Towards the Future
Between 72 and 108 children in the Ottawa area will benefit from the program by participating in this study. Just as importantly, mental-health therapists and developmental-service providers in the region will get trained in supporting children with autism who have challenges with social skills or emotion regulation. Finally, the researchers will learn about scaling up mental-health interventions for autistic children under real-world conditions.
Funding
Kids Brain Health Network – $218,655.00
Team
Principal Investigators
Dr. Vivian Lee, Carleton University
Dr. Jonathan Weiss, York University
Co-Investigators
Dr. Ariel Cascio, Central Michigan University
Dr. Eric Racine, IRCM and Université de Montréal
Dr. Johanna Lake, Centre for Addiction and Mental Health
Dr. Meng-Chuan Lai, Centre for Addiction and Mental Health
Dr. Kendra Thomson, Brock University
Dr. Kylie Gray, University of Warwick
Dr. Stephanie Ameis, Centre for Addiction and Mental Health
Partners
Youth Services Bureau of Ottawa
Social Science Translated
Children’s Hospital of Eastern Ontario
ACT Learning
Crossroads Children’s Mental Health Centre
Previous Initiatives
