Mental Health and Video Games

Prior to reading these articles and listening to the presentation in class, I had never associated mental health and video games together. I did not think that video games displayed mental health (usually in a negative way), or that video games were actually being used to treat some mental health issues. I am someone who cares a lot about mental health and when I heard that video games were portraying mental health in a negative way, that really angered me. The worst part about these video games is that someone is making a lot of money by producing these video games while many people around the world are dying because they are battling mental health. The article titled Gaming’s favorite villain is mental illness, and this needs to stop really caught my attention when it stated

“We aren’t being encouraged to understand and empathize with mental illness, we’re being taught by pop culture to fear it” (Lindsey 2014).

I agree with this statement because the group presentors and the article talks about how mental health are being portrayed as a negative illiness and not being used to simply remind players that mental illness is as real as it is severe. Because these video games are making the characters in them to be displaying this type of insane behavior it is causing many people to fear mental illinesses. When the presentors stated the fact that when a study was preformed in Canada about how many people would feel uncomfortable if they were in a room with someone who is mentally ill that a large amount of them said that they would feel very uncomfortable with that. I think a lot of that uncomfortableness comes from video games that are set in an insane asylum and give off these false images of what one is actually battling with. That was alarming to me because in this article it stated that approximately 10 percent of americans are living with some form of diagnosable mental illness which means that a lot of people are struggling with mental illness and the last thing that someone with a mental illness would want is someone to be fearful of them. That is why video games need to stop displaying mental illness in such a negative way. Again in this article it states

“There is no obvious physical indication that someone is struggling with a mental health concern. They don’t swell up or wear a cast or waste away, evoking the sympathy and understanding of those around them. They sit at their cubicles or their home office desks or behind their bathroom mirrors and often suffer in silence” (Lindsey 2014).

This is something that I could not consider to be more true. I have known quite a few who have struggled with mental illness and if I did not know them on such a personal level, I would have never known that they were extremely depressed. This is the exact opposite of what many video games are portraying. Again, another reason why these video games must be stopped.

The second article that talked about how video games are being used to help fight depression is something that I did not know was currently being used as a method to fight depression. Before reading this article I did not know that “The reward pathways and the hippocampus, are the same two regions that get chronically under stimulated, and that even shrink over time, when we’re clinically depressed” (McGonigal). I thought that this was super interesting because it seems like a relatively easy way to stimulate the brain and essentially reverse the effects that depression has on someone. I’d be curious to know if there have people who have battled with depression by using video games and saw a drastic improvement in their health because of video games and didn’t know that it was the video games that helped them. I’d also be curious to find out that if people who were depressed knew that video games could help their mental health if it actually would improve their health or if it was just a placebo effect. Another interesting aspect to this method of treating depression is, I wonder what the long term benefits of this method are? Do they have long term benefits? I know some people choose to use drugs and alcohol to escape their everyday struggles and stresses but once they are not using these things that their problems are still there. I am curious if this is something that is similar with gaming and treating depression. For example, people who are depressed start to feel better after playing video games but once they are done playing video games for the day, do they feel better or are they still feeling as depressed? Overall I think this is a really cool study that is being done and I would like to learn more about it and I hope it does help many people who are battling with deppression.

Lindsey, P. (2014, July 21). Gaming’s favorite villain is mental illness, and this needs to stop. Retrieved November 11, 2017, from https://www.polygon.com/2014/7/21/5923095/mental-health-gaming-silent-hill

McGonigal, J. (2015, November 09). How Video Games Can Teach Your Brain to Fight Depression. Retrieved November 11, 2017, from http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/future_tense/2015/11/how_video_games_can_teach_your_brain_to_fight_depression.html