Enhancing Addiction Treatment Through Psychoeducation: Evaluating the Feasibility and Acceptability of a Neuroscience-Informed Mobile App

To address this gap, the Neuroscience-Informed Psychoeducation for Addiction (NIPA) program was developed as one of the first initiatives in the field of SUDs to raise individuals' awareness about cognitive deficits (metacognition) associated with drug and alcohol use. NIPA is an app-based digital program that integrates neuroscience-based psychoeducation and game-based cognitive training. It consists of four 20-minute-long sessions covering neurocognitive functions commonly impaired in SUDs, such as attention, memory, cognitive flexibility, and impulsivity / decision-making. Each session includes videos, animations and cartoons depicting specific cognitive problems (e.g. in attention, decision-making, etc.), followed by games created by adapting common neurocognitive tasks (e.g. Stroop task, gambling task), designed to engage the specific cognitive function reviewed in the session and to raise individual's awareness of how they employ these cognitive functions to solve game-based puzzles and real-life problems. Each cognitive function is depicted in terms of the underlying brain network(s) (e.g. default mode network, salience network), which is followed by a set of brain training strategies and exercises that aim to improve resilience when exposed to substances and to motivate patients to invest time and effort in their treatment and to pursue cognitive rehabilitation interventions. The main goals of the proposed study are to determine whether the intervention is feasible and acceptable for patients with SUDs who are currently in treatment; and to obtain some preliminary data on its utility to increase metacognitive awareness, reduce depression and anxiety, and improve daily executive functioning and impulse control in patients with SUDs. We hypothesize that providing patients with the NIPA program may improve their metacognition, daily executive function, and mental health.