Mental Health Blog Post
Mental Health within Video Games
Given the opportunity to look into how mental health is related to video games, I read the article Gaming’s favorite villain is mental illness, and this needs to stop. This article’s first line within this text explains, “One of the most destructive aspects of mental illness is that it is invisible. There is no obvious physical indication that someone is struggling with a mental health concern” (Lindsey, 2014). This really stood out to me because it’s incredible true and it’s one of the worst things about mental illness, you truly never know what someone is going through mentally unless they are willing to open up or explain this to you. I particularly liked this topic because I myself struggle with mental illness and I also have many friends that struggle with mental illness as well. The discussion surrounding mental illnesses is sometimes looked down on because it makes the ones with the mental illness feel like an outsider and also makes it hard to have conversations about it with family and loved ones because the fear of being misunderstood.
Mental health within video games are normally horror games, that genre loves to use mental illness when making these games, using the characters in these games as a type of “crazy person” in unique situations. This article describes how developers use these games as, “a brush-off and a hand-wave, painting mental illness as a magical black box we can neither see into nor ever hope to understand, rather than as a condition that real human people with brains and feelings and mortgages live with on a daily basis” (Lindsey, 2014). I believe that if you try to introduce a topic that is as serious as mental health in video games you shouldn’t be using the characters as “Insane” or “trapped” humans to try and explain these topics. This article also explains different games one being The Cat Lady, “Susan Ashworth, the game’s protagonist, begins the game as a suicide survivor who must come face-to-face with her mortality. Her quest is not one of survival — Susan is granted immortality at the game’s beginning so she can’t die — but of rebuilding” (Lindsay, 2014). I believe a game like this could actually be a positive impact for people with depression because throughout the protagonist quest she is discovering the value of life and how to make the world a better place around her. She also helps others with similar mental illnesses to work through and survive under the same circumstances. This could be used for people that have depression to dive into a virtual world and learn from what this character goes through. This could also kind of help them forget about the struggles they’re encountering in real life.
To conclude I believe that mental health is a topic that is becoming easier to talk about but is still something that people struggle to have conversations about because they don’t want to be misunderstood or even thought to be crazy. When video games use mental health within their game I think they need to be careful because there truly is a fine line that shouldn’t be crossed due to the significance of this illness. If these creators use mental health they should use it in a positive way to help those that believe they are alone and don’t know how to talk to others about how they’re feeling.
