A term that you will hear me say a lot, rather in this article or in person, is "Gaming Therapy". When I talk about it, people do not realize how important and pivotal this term is to my belief and my very existence. I don't think anyone can really understand how important gaming has become in my life unless you are an actual gamer who suffers from an alignment of mental health problems. Granted, growing up in the world of the internet, with games being international social hubs, where we meet and grow and bond with people from all over the world, we run into similarities and conversations of folks who seem to understand how important the gaming industry is to us.
Growing up in this world, I have heard stories similar to my own as well as stories that are far worst than mine. People who are depressed, riddled with social anxiety, scared of their environments, living with abusive loved ones, coming online to escape their troubles, to be around other folks who have like minds, to find love and peace from their chaotic real-world problems. Living fantastic lives of fantasy, mystical wonder, sci-fi adventures, and complex puzzle-solving plights. A lot of us gamers, including myself, would not be here today if it wasn't for forging friendships and bonds with our teammates while conquering the castle of Aden in Lineage II, or defeating Sylvanas and stopping her plans in World of Warcraft, or being the last team standing in Call of Duty: Warzone or even relaxing on your family farm with your mates in Stardew Valley. Forging these relationships with folks all over the world is truly one of the many reasons why I am able to be here, writing this article for you to read.
Let me first start off by saying, I am not a therapist. I am not a doctor. I am not a professional in the slightest. What I am discussing here is purely from personal experiences. What I'm talking about here is solely from the eyes of my own. From the research of my own. When talking about topics like mental health, there are many avenues and ways to help and treat them. I am not here telling you that you should stop your current treatments, or not seek treatments at all. This article is not about that. It's about looking at, what I believe, a dynamic of why I feel the gaming industry and video games are important to myself and others that I have come in contact with. This is an experience piece in which I wish to express on a more serious note, unlike my previous works on this blog. It is a way for me to convey my emotions as best as I can, because you may not notice this, but I am not very good at conveying my emotions unless I am writing.
What I'm about to talk about will involve myself opening up about personal matters. Emotions that I don't really talk about outside of my inner sanctum. It will leave me vulnerable and anxious and nervous. Even now as I type, I am impacted with emotions of depression, sadness, fear because tapping into this raw emotion, I am only capable of doing so through writing. I am going to be talking about how I truly view myself, how I view my world, how I think, things that I have done in the past and present, and this all makes me feel an infinite amount of fear. I do this either way because part of me feels that there are others who go through this but are too scared to talk about it, or do not understand that they feel this way. I do this piece in hopes that there is another person out there who reads this and it makes them feel better that they are not alone. I have quite many reasons why, and I hope that this helps someone who has been looking for a way to help themselves to a healthier and better lifestyle or maybe gives them the power to finally go see that therapist or take that medication or just makes one person's cloudy and dark day have a ray of sunlight in it.
Now before we get into it, let me give you a walk into my world. This is how I view myself in the day-to-day. This may be a trigger warning for many, but it is important to this story. I'm a 39-year-old failure. Most of it stems from my chronic depression, ADHD, and, from what I believe, adult autism. I'm a father of two glorious twin boys who I have little to no contact with, 50% because of my anxiety and paranoia and the other 50% because of a toxic ex-girlfriend who has spent 7 years of my life in a mentally, physically, and emotionally abusive marriage with another mentally ill Army veteran. I currently live with a friend who I feel like I am constantly failing on a day-to-day basis, and I currently do contract work for customer service which hasn't really been giving me enough hours to barely feed myself. I try to do good things and do right, but I get so into myself, my own sadness and anxiety that I sabotage relationships and burn bridges with people out of fear that they will just end up doing it to me in the future anyway so I might as well do it to myself. Those are actual thoughts that run through my head. Even just recently, I broke the heart of someone, and even though I owned up to my mistake, it doesn't change anything. Due to my previous run-in with serious relationships, I now have a deep-rooted fear of them. Let us now boggle all of that with suicidal tendencies, idolization, self-harm in the past, panic attacks, fear, dissociation from my thoughts, my surroundings, and time itself. All of this while not being medicated, talking to a therapist, or even being able to afford to do any of those.
Don't get me wrong, I would love to be on medication and being able to sit down with someone to talk with them but I just can't. Here in the states, the cost of medical treatments and therapy without insurance is expensive. Oh, how I am envious of my international friends who are able to get help and it not costing them a dime because of free healthcare, but I was not lucky enough to be born in that star. It's a struggling problem in the US. A problem that many of us just aren't properly treated for, like me.
In fear of boring you with statistics, I am going to drop just a little bit to give some of you an idea. In 2019, 20.6% of adults in the U.S. experienced mental illness states the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI). That is 51.5 million people or 1 in 5 adults in case you were wondering. Now while 5.2% of adults experience SERIOUS mental illness in that same year. The numbers for youths are not far from these, only varying a couple of percent. You can read about it here. All of this matters because the number of folks who are being treated is not even nearly enough. And the demographics are staggering even more because Lesbian, Gay, or Bisexual take up 44.1% of the numbers of those with these conditions with mixed/multiracial coming in second at 31.7%. And when it does come to treatment and those of us who are actively seeking help through the system, Non-Hispanic Whites take up 50.3% of those being treated following close second are Females at 49.7%. Which is really sad when you keep reading the statistics. I am a black male in the US. Blacks or African Americans are only 32.9% being treated while males are 36.8% being treated. If you have never seen or read these numbers, you REALLY should. This country truly does have a mental health dilemma and we haven't even talked about specifics of suicide rates and the like.
Throughout my life, I have talked to and bonded with many people over video games. In times when I felt alone, scared, anxious, it felt good to just load up an online game and to just play with folks who also enjoy the same experiences. I honestly became a Twitch streamer because I was depressed. If it wasn't for my father introducing me to games like Quake and Quake II and the online competitive nature of those games, I would never have even thought about online gaming. I was, trapped in the possibilities of playing against other people across the globe and just having fun doing it. It wasn't until I played my first Massive Multiplayer Online (MMO) game, Final Fantasy IX, where I really began to blossom and dive in deep into the gaming culture. Even though I use to frequent Yahoo Chat back in those days, it was online gaming that introduced me to it. Twenty-plus years and I still have friends all over the world who I consider really close and important to me and it all came from online gaming. Rather if it was spending endless nights grinding catacomb dungeons, multitasking multiple characters in Lineage 2 with my friends, or spending countless nights in Skype, Ventrillo, MSN Messenger, talking and laughing and watching movies after a successful night of raids or castle sieging, gaming has brought me powerful and important people.
Video games stimulate the imagination. They cultivate emotional responses both positive and negative. Most negative responses come in the form of competitive games which can kind of sum up to the thrill of competition from any competitive sport, but in a large dynamic, the gaming culture is one of the positive reinforcements. Yes, I know, there are toxic people on the internet. There are people who are very much capable of bad things, and use the internet as a segway because they feel safe and no repercussions will be had once they throw out their toxicity at other people. Like any good thing, there are always bad variables. But the underline foundation of video gaming on the internet is all about forging relationships. That is what any video game developer wishes for. A powerful community of like-minded individuals to sit back and enjoy their projects. The Guardian, a news source wrote an article talking about how Oxford, in 2019 had started doing research on the benefits of video gaming on mental health using the new Animal Crossing game. The article talks about how they were able to create data through surveys and how video games very well can be good for mental health and help them understand games being a leisure activity. There were a lot of great tidbits in the article, especially how little data video game companies had on their players and "how little hard data had been used by previous studies into the potential harms or benefits of gaming." says researcher Andrew Przybylski. In his research, he found out that just by playing four hours of Animal Crossing a day "you’re a much happier human being, but that’s only interesting because all of the other research before this is done so badly."
As a gamer, that all sounded weird to me. I mean, for years I always knew that games were beneficial. Years ago, I cannot recall how many, I had come to the conclusion that I was going to end my own life. I was in a bad headspace and I was holding onto a bottle of pills. I had finished up self-harming and I thought to myself that I was tired of feeling the way that I do. I told myself that this was it for me. End of my chapter. It was late into the morning and I hadn't been eating and sleeping properly. I decided to log into my favorite game at that time, again Lineage 2, which if you haven't figured out, REALLY had an impact on me growing up, and got to play. Ran into a good friend of mine who I won't say her name, but we started playing together. We got to talking and she actually started opening up to me about some things she was going through. And it was through those talks, the laughs and the joy I had with spending time with her, that I changed my mind. To this day she still is someone who I am very much bonded to and care about and still keeps in contact with. And she never is the wiser to know that she saved my life that day and on many other days to come after that.
I can't even count the number of times that playing a game of League of Legends and venting out all of my pent up frustrations and anger in that oh so toxic and competitive game and feeling better that I was able to release all of that anger that I hold to this very day. How many times I have sat down playing games like No Man Sky or Stardew Valley and just relaxing and putting my mind at ease after spending an hour crying silently in my room. I use to think that I didn't have an addictive personality. I smoke cigarettes, drink alcohol, and have partaken in substance abuse in my past and never felt like I needed them. I use to tell myself that I'm so glad that I don't have an addiction, but I didn't realize that gaming took up a lot of those feelings and needs of wanting to go get drunk at a bar and swallow my emotions. Video games have very well allowed me to express myself in most ways positively. Though I have lots of dreams of grandeur, like wanting to be a novelist as well as write articles for a living, and I know that I have a lot to learn because I am in no way shape, or form perfect, video games have taught me a lot about myself.
Yea, I can be a crude person, but lots of that has to do with me having to constantly put up constant walls of protection. I am constantly defensive because I have consistent trust issues. Trust in others and trust in me. I am always in fear and panic mode and growing up, being bullied in school, not understanding my own mental illnesses or treating them better, I had to learn on my own. It's hard to let people in and again, plenty of times, I would ruin perfectly good relationships, especially lately, because of fear and sadness. I have a lot of problems in my life. I have a lot of things in my life that I have done, or not done, that I am not proud of and haunt me to this day. I truly believe that if it wasn't for video games that I wouldn't be here this day. I am constantly fighting and surviving and hoping that one day I don't have to be constantly on guard. That I don't have to live the proverbial "normal life". That I can get the professional help that I need, that I want and that maybe I can one day live my dreams. Till then I will be playing the new Guilty Gear Strive or traveling the new world of Phantasy Star Online 2, or just enjoying a good ole fashioned fishing game like Cat Goes Fishing.
No matter what the future holds for me, good or bad, I can at least hope that I get to continue to play games and continue to build long-lasting relationships, and to keep dreaming of a better tomorrow for myself. So no matter what or who you are, if you read this and you have experienced the same or similar or just any problems and feel the same way that gaming is a huge impact on your positive mental health, just know that you are far from being alone and hopefully one day scientist, doctors, and researchers can stop with the "video games are why kids are violent" and look more into the psychological and health benefits of rallying together for a common goal and succeeding.
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