Christina Bauer

And I think that a lot of people dealing with depression or other issues

other illnesses as well, right?

Think of other mental illnesses or also physical illnesses.

I think just reflecting on those strengths that people show, that's basically really the goal of the intervention.

And so people read stories from other people

highlighting kind of what those strengths could look like.

And then they are invited to reflect on their own experience, which is, of course, you know, everybody has different, you know, experiences with depression and different lives just in general.

So there's space in the form of a writing exercise for you to think about how have you experienced depression?

How have you contended with depression?

And what types of strengths have you shown in your experience?

And that's basically it.

Yeah, so we've done a series of experiments really similar to what people may be familiar with in medicine, where you have an intervention condition.

So you give people not medicine as you would in medical studies, but this reflection exercise.

And then you have a control group that you compare it to.

And what we've seen in these experiments is that the intervention improves the sense of self-efficacy, so the kind of confidence that people have in themselves, right?

So at baseline, basically, a lot of people think like, well, I'm just so, you know, I can't do a lot.

I feel like I'm just, you know, I'm not strong enough to pursue my goals in life.

And with intervention, they believe in themselves more.

And then perhaps even more importantly, even over time, this actually becomes kind of a self-fulfilling prophecy effect, right?

so people because they have more confidence in themselves they also stay more engaged in their goals and over the course of two weeks that we accompanied participants they also report greater goal pursuit progress so we've asked them for their goals in life and then you know two weeks later we asked them how far have you come you know in your goals and people had all kinds of different goals