Thank You For Playing: How Group Creative Experiences Boost Mental Health

There is an improv game called Search Party, in which each player is impacted by a request from another player, e.g. Player 1 initiates by making a specific request to another player, and in that initiation identifying who the characters are to one another.
Player 1: “Dad, I don’t have a nice suit to wear to prom. I’m hoping you can help me get one somehow.”
Player 2: Yes, of course! First I have to make a call.
Player 3 joins “Dad,” who has to assign a role to this new character and ask them for something he needs in order to help out Player 1’s character.
Player 2: Mary, I need to come over and go through those boxes I stored in your basement. I hope I can do it today.
Player 3: Yes, sure, I just have to make a call first and I’ll get right back to you. Mary to Player 4: I was really looking forward to today but I have to cancel. My brother is coming over to go through some boxes and he doesn’t know we are seeing each other.

And this goes on until everyone in the group has taken on a role in this interconnected network of needs and relationships. New roles and connections can be made until it circles back to the original “ask” which might be rewarded in some unusual way that could never have been provided by the “Dad” character, nor predicted, nor possible without the beat-by-beat unfolding of a story that is made up in real time. The “search” in this exercise is for a new connection that drives the story, for a possible discovery or maybe the group’s resilience to try again if the creative flow gets stalled out somehow. But it is as rewarding as a home run in baseball or a bank shot in basketball when the story does make it back to the original request, and everyone played a part.

This improv exercise integrate key elements of a non-medical prescription for some of the most common mental health concerns: anxiety, depressive episodes, feeling “triggered” and not in control of one’s emotions and self-limiting beliefs that block the capacity to manage or make change. The “Search Party” game shows how this works. To use a more improv-focused word, how it “plays.” Each player only has to respond to one other player at a time, and to play effectively…