{"id":294248,"date":"2026-02-20T23:49:19","date_gmt":"2026-02-20T23:49:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/294248\/"},"modified":"2026-02-20T23:49:19","modified_gmt":"2026-02-20T23:49:19","slug":"mental-health-treatment-which-includes-playing-tetris-eliminates-intrusive-flashbacks","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/294248\/","title":{"rendered":"Mental health treatment, which includes playing Tetris eliminates intrusive flashbacks"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>The team conducted a randomised controlled trial with 99 healthcare workers split into three groups:<\/p>\n<p>The first group used the mental rotation intervention the team had developedThe second group received a placebo intervention where they listened to Mozart music and podcastsThe third group had access to standard care<\/p>\n<p>\u201cOne remarkable thing about this trial is that participants in the placebo arm of the study, who were listening to Mozart, were certain that that was the real intervention \u2013 that they were getting the active treatment. This suggested to Emily and I that our findings were not the result of a placebo effect,\u201d said Summers.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>The results showed that participants in the mental rotation group had <a href=\"https:\/\/www.thelancet.com\/journals\/lanpsy\/article\/PIIS2215-0366(25)00397-9\/fulltext\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\">10 times fewer intrusive memories<\/a> than those in the control and Mozart groups four weeks after starting the intervention. Furthermore after six months of the trial 70% of people in the mental rotation group were completely free of intrusive memories.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>\u201cThese results are incredibly impressive for such a simple-to-use intervention,\u201d said Tayla McCloud, Digital Mental Health Innovation Lead at Wellcome. \u201cIt\u2019s rare to see something so accessible, scalable and adaptable across contexts. It doesn\u2019t require patients to put their trauma into words, and even transcends language barriers.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>\u201cI had no idea it would work so quickly. At first, I thought I was doing something wrong \u2013 when I tried to visualise the memory so I could do the intervention, it wasn\u2019t coming. It was so soon after I\u2019d started the trial, it didn\u2019t occur to me that it was the treatment working, until I told the study team,\u201d said Irene. \u201cNow, when I think about those memories, I can remember what happened, but all the stress and the sadness that used to come with them have gone.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The team conducted a randomised controlled trial with 99 healthcare workers split into three groups: The first group&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":294249,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[35],"tags":[134,554,555,111,139,69],"class_list":{"0":"post-294248","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-mental-health","8":"tag-health","9":"tag-mental-health","10":"tag-mentalhealth","11":"tag-new-zealand","12":"tag-newzealand","13":"tag-nz"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/294248","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=294248"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/294248\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/294249"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=294248"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=294248"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=294248"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}