Supporting the Mental Health of Kids with Autism

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.