CopeWellA useful pause.
Help shape what comes next.
A satisfying pocket game designed to help someone pause and regain room to choose their next action.
This working concept contains four games, seven guided coping activities, and a quiet noticing practice. This concept is intended for adult review and has not been evaluated for people under 18. Please explore it using the fictional examples. We are asking for a critical review of the content, usability, and suitability, not an endorsement.
What to try first
- Open the home screen without explanation. Is the first action obvious?
- Play Blocks, then try Make a Pattern. Can you understand and control them without frustration?
- Open Activities, then Work through a thought. Try Know / Guess / Don’t Know and Collect Thoughts with fictional examples.
- Use Finish midway through an activity. Does the ending make it easy to return to daily life?
- Find human help from a game, a writing activity, and the home screen.
Four games, seven guided activities, and quiet noticing
The skill connections below are design rationales. They do not establish therapeutic effectiveness for these digital adaptations.
Blocks
Place pieces and clear rows or columns. Hints, undo, and a saved board. Choose free play or a three-line challenge, with or without points and a collection. Blocks badges track game milestones, while the separate app collection records completed activities. Neither mode has a timer.
Connection and limit: A visual distraction hypothesis, not a DBT skill or a tested craving intervention.
Notice
Find matching geometric shapes despite different colors and orientations. Three board sizes and fresh scenes.
Connection and limit: Observation and focused attention. Visual matching does not by itself teach nonjudgmental awareness.
One Thread
Move connected dots until their lines stop crossing. Three sizes, undo, drag, tap, and arrow-key controls.
Connection and limit: An attention task. “One-mindfully” is an inspiration, not evidence that solving the puzzle transfers a mindfulness skill.
Make a Pattern
Rotate mosaic tiles to match a visible target. Three sizes, undo, and an optional one-tile hint.
Connection and limit: Spatial attention and a clear present task. Not an emotional processing intervention.
Collect Thoughts
Describe an event, notice a feeling, identify a need, and optionally choose a next action.
Connection and limit: Observe and describe, emotion naming. No automatic interpretation or assessment of the user’s words.
Know / Guess / Don’t Know
Sort statements from ten fictional scenes. Any answer can continue. An explanation is also available without answering.
Connection and limit: A narrow introduction to checking the facts. It does not teach the full skill or judge a user’s personal beliefs.
Both Can Be True
Complete ten fictional situations with a perspective that makes space for acceptance and change.
Connection and limit: Dialectical thinking and validation. No requirement to accept harm, stay in an unsafe situation, or erase a feeling.
Say It Clearly
Draft a description, its impact, a request, and an optional boundary. Nothing is sent.
Connection and limit: Selected interpersonal-effectiveness ideas. Not the full DEAR MAN, GIVE, or FAST protocols, or advice to confront an unsafe person.
Pause & Choose
Move between pausing, stepping back, noticing, and choosing a next action. External focus is offered alongside optional body awareness. The draft resumes on this device. A step explicitly kept in Your space appears when finishing.
Connection and limit: Original prompts informed by STOP and urge surfing. No claim that the wave measures an urge, that distress must decrease, or that completion prevents harm.
Weigh My Options
Compare the possible benefits and costs of acting on an impulse and of pausing or choosing another response. Keep, edit, export, or remove a card.
Connection and limit: Pros and cons for a decision that can safely wait. No score, automatic recommendation, or weighing whether to harm someone.
Quiet noticing
Follow an ordinary detail around you, at your own pace.
Connection and limit: Present-moment attention practice. Not treatment or an instruction to ignore an unsafe environment.
Cope Ahead
Plan for an everyday challenge, choose a first action and backup, and rehearse the first step.
Connection and limit: Coping ahead, with optional imagery. Not trauma exposure, crisis planning, or withdrawal management.
Evidence we can—and cannot—carry forward
DBT has four core skills domains: mindfulness, distress tolerance, emotion regulation, and interpersonal effectiveness. Their inclusion here is grounded in teaching resources, not evidence that our implementation produces DBT outcomes. University of Houston–Clear Lake: DBT teaching resources.
Checking the facts and coping ahead are described in DBT emotion-regulation teaching. Our shortened prompts need review for fidelity, comprehension, and inappropriate use. UHCL: emotion-regulation skills, including checking the facts. Behavioral Tech: coping ahead.
A small study of 31 students found lower immediate craving intensity after brief Tetris play. That does not validate our untimed puzzles, demonstrate emotion processing, or show relapse prevention. Skorka-Brown et al., 2015.
Digital adaptation also needs caution. In a randomized trial involving adults with frequent suicidal ideation, offering a brief online DBT skills program increased self-harm relative to usual care. That result does not describe all DBT or this app, but it directly challenges the assumption that extracting a few skills into an app is automatically safe or effective. Simon et al., JAMA, 2022.
No CopeWell clinical study has been conducted. We make no claim to treat ADHD, OCD, addiction, trauma, or suicidality. We do not include EMDR, a detox pathway, symptom scoring, AI counseling, or a crisis-monitoring service. Our research page contains the wider reading list and its limits.
Questions for your review
- Which activity is likely to be helpful for which situation, and which users should avoid or adapt it?
- Where could distraction reinforce avoidance, reassurance seeking, compulsive repetition, or delayed help seeking?
- Does any prompt invalidate a real concern, imply a correct feeling, or oversimplify a DBT skill?
- Are instructions understandable while stressed, tired, or distracted?
- Do the visuals, sounds, and challenge feel pleasant, neutral, or frustrating?
- Can someone stop without completing a puzzle or feeling a need to “get it right”?
- What supervision, age limits, safety changes, and evaluation would you require before patient use?
How we would evaluate it
Begin with clinician content review and observed usability sessions. Before testing clinical outcomes, define the population, comparator, adverse-event handling, and a reviewed protocol. Measure whether a person can start, understand, stop, and return to a chosen action. Longer play time and more completed levels are not mental-health outcomes. Optional reports of usefulness or worsening should never earn rewards.
Current limits of this build
- This is a browser concept for feedback, not an App Store release or a clinical recommendation.
- Account integration and account-separated local storage are implemented in source but the real account service is not connected in this public concept. They remain required before the intended public release.
- Games and writing save in this browser. Personal writing has no separate lock or app-level encryption. Use fictional examples on shared devices. Clearing browser data can erase it.
- Practice scenes are finite and repeat. The geometric games generate new boards.
- Native iPhone haptics, real-device accessibility, and clinical suitability need dedicated validation.
- The name and copewell.io domain have not been legally cleared or connected by this build.
Who is behind it?
CopeWell is a concept from AddictionHelp.com, published by Senior Health Group LLC. This review preview requires no payment. Launch pricing and any future commercial arrangements have not been finalized. Questions about the product or business: info@addictionhelp.com.
Prepared for discussion. No clinician approval is implied. Please do not include identifiable patient information in feedback.