Denise Brodey wants to make chronic illness support more fun and accessible.
The former Forbes health journalist created SPIKE!, a card game for chronic illness peer support groups , to help people tell their stories. She developed SPIKE! in the fall of 2025 as a capstone project for the Media, Medicine, and Health master’s program from Harvard Medical School.
Its name comes from the spike protein in COVID that allows the virus to enter human cells. Players choose three cards from a deck of 27 images — one that represents their life before chronic illness, one for the present, and one that looks toward the future. Brodey facilitates discussion around players’ experiences with chronic illness using the cards they choose. Cards feature images aimed at striking up conversations — one card shows a pink macaroon, another is a pile of dirty dishes, and another has a stop sign.
SPIKE! is part of a service Brodey brings to peer support groups so people with chronic illness can better tell their health care stories and advocate for themselves. The cards are downloadable for free while the game is in its testing phase.
She’s hoping the game can bridge the communication gaps between patients and providers. “Everything I’m doing is in service of trying to figure out how to help patients in ways that doctors don’t have time for,” Brodey said.
About 40 people, including testers and patients, have already played the game, Brodey said.
A patient group at Brigham and Women’s COVID Recovery Center tested the game in March. Julie Sullivan, the program’s manager, said SPIKE! was a valuable tool for patients.
“It was really helpful for [patients] to look at these experiences and put things into words that they maybe hadn’t before,” Sullivan said. “It was a safer storytelling way of talking about their experiences.”
Before the game reached patients, SPIKE! started in a classroom across the Charles River.
Mikael Jakobsson, an MIT game culture and design researcher who taught the Harvard class that Brodey took, said SPIKE!’s simplicity makes it especially effective. He said the complexity of the game isn’t in its rules or process but the conversation it encourages.
“The game really lives in the interactions between the players,” Jakobsson said. “The secret sauce of that game is really [Brodey]. She just has a unique ability to make people feel comfortable talking about difficult things and she does it with a lot of warmth and humor.”
Elizabeth Meyer, Brodey’s peer in the “Games for Health and Well-Being” course who also experiences chronic illness, watched SPIKE! come to life over the semester, and offered feedback along the way.
“The beauty and longevity of SPIKE! is that it understands that things don’t magically go away,” Meyer said. “It really is a place where you can acknowledge the frustrating realities of living with chronic illness.”
Brodey used her own experience with chronic illness to inform her gamemaking.
She was diagnosed with long COVID, a condition recognized by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control that has a wide array of symptoms including fatigue, joint pain, and brain fog. She said managing her symptoms was a “full-time job” and made her feel isolated.
Brodey dabbled with alternative treatments when she was searching for answers to her illness. She completed the Lightning Process — a three-day commercial program including osteopathy and life coaching that aims to treat people with chronic illness. It’s faced controversy among the chronic illness community because some believe it exploits long COVID patients. Brodey said she does not endorse the Lightning Process.
While experiencing treatment-resistant depression that stemmed from her experience with chronic illness, Brodey said, she also underwent doctor-prescribed intravenous ketamine doses in hopes of “jumpstarting” the healing process.
“It’s kind of out there, I admit it. But I kind of didn’t care,” Brodey said. “I treated myself as an experiment.” She said she does not recommend these experimental treatments for others with chronic illness.
She eventually found that hot yoga, flexibility training and work at Boston Brain Integration eased her symptoms. Boston Brain Integration uses “crossinology,” a form of applied kinesiology, neurophysiology and acupressure, to “reconnect neural pathways in the brain that have shut down under stress,” according to its website. Crossinology is widely considered a pseudoscientific alternative therapy.
Brodey’s next steps are finding out how to make SPIKE! a “main quest thing.”
Brodey is the author of “The Elephant in the Playroom,” a book that gives readers a glimpse into the lives of 41 families raising children with invisible disabilities. She hopes to one day create a version to discuss chronic illness, “The Elephant in the Exam Room.”
“The idea of patients connecting with each other, peers supporting each other, and doctors hearing these details in a way that’s not like anything they’ve ever heard before — that’s my goal,” Brodey said. “It starts conversations and you’ll never know where they go.”