Adventurers Group is a coaching and peer support group created and run by licensed mental health clinicans.

It started as an idea between several counselors working in a group practice together.  We were brainstorming ideas for how to make helping people more fun.  It did not need to be therapy exactly, but it did need to help people and use our skills and experience.  We thought of a lot of different ideas, but the ones we kept coming back to were related to using our love of games.  

We started doing research on how to combine games with therapy, but kept coming up with limitations related to the nature of therapy, such as insurance billing, HIPAA (no surprise, but Steam is not HIPAA compliant), and medical necessity (treatment based on a diagnosis).  At the same time Dungeons & Dragons or Call of Duty do not really fit in a standard idea of treatment.  To be clear, we are therapists and love therapy, but it felt difficult to combine them how we wanted to.

So we decided to combine our skills as trained and licensed mental health professionals with our love of games as well.  We feel strongly that our clinical skills and experience would allow us to run coaching and support groups much better, even if the groups were not therapy groups. We all have run groups before: treatment groups, psychotherapy groups, clinical training groups, psychoeducation groups, grief groups, teen groups, parenting groups, you name it.  We knew that engagement mattered for success for those in the group, and that people can also be held back by feeling self conscious or having social concerns.  Most of us had used activities and games to break the ice or just keep things moving in sessions.  

And our research showed that other people had thought of the same idea: 

1) games make things fun, and fun makes groups work better. 

2) Pleasant activities can improve people’s ability to open up in a group and increase group cohesion.

3) A lot of people don’t get help because traditional therapy does not appeal to them.

4) Activities can be the tools that allow for practicing skills and making progress.

So we decided to get training and start figuring it out.  After about 2 years of work and preparation, this is the result.  Affordable groups with the best skilled clinicans we can find, that can also nerd out over D&D, Civ 6, or any number of games.

We encourage you to give it a try.  It might sound a little different, but that’s because it is.  That’s what makes it fun.  Come join one of our groups.  Make some friends, play some games, have a good time, and get a little help.