Joshua Lundberg once ran away from his demons
It’s safe to say mental health is rapidly becoming less of a taboo in society. While this may not be the case for discrimination in the workplace and alienation socially, it’s certainly made huge strides in the last five years alone through the bravery of many people and the successes of organisations like Beyond Blue.
As someone who lives with Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, general anxiety and depression, I’ve spent much of my life struggling with the balance of anxiety and the goings-on in life, and that’s regularly affected my relationship with games.
As I’ve mentioned a number of times, I was a bit of a late bloomer on the gaming front; I dabbled in PC games like SkyRoads and Wacky Wheels. I didn’t get absorbed by games until I was given a PlayStation as a gift in 1999. As I entered adolescence and my tendency to avoid confrontation of my disorder grew, games became quite the crutch; it’s hard to think about life and the world when you’re absorbed in a game. As a pastime they were an escape, a continuation of avoidance.
This isn’t to say gaming wasn’t immediately a liberating, exhilarating hobby. I was passionate about experiencing things I would never experience in real life through the medium. The issue was it was through the lens of avoidance and escape – a negative escape.
If you’re unfamiliar with how OCD works, it’s not the Monk nonsense. Yes, people are tortured by either intermittent or almost-constant compulsions to act out ‘rituals’, but the reasons why are infinitely more interesting and complex. I can’t speak as an authority on the various manifestations of OCD, but I can discuss the exhausting, confusing and unrelenting assault on the mind that ‘intrusive thoughts’ can be, and why videogames make a good mechanism for escape from them.
It’s best to speak with a qualified practitioner when discussing these things, but essentially intrusive thoughts are morbid, disturbing thoughts that pass through the mind of a person with OCD as though those thoughts are their own. They can range from visions of horrible incidents that ‘will occur’ if the inflicted person does not, say, flick a light switch eight times, to thoughts that if they hold their nephew they’ll throw them off a balcony.
The taboo with OCD in particular comes from the fact that an exploration of what’s happening with someone who has the disorder reveals horrendously disturbing information. The thing is, they don’t actually think those things. It’s more akin to picking up on an unwanted radio signal that prevents you from hearing things relevant to you.
So, taking this into account, it’s easy to see how videogames can provide an arena where a person can exercise complete control. It’s not a coincidence that the two genres I fell in love with instantly, and almost-exclusively, were First-Person Shooters and Real-Time Strategy games; two genres with limited chaos and a remarkable sense of player agency.
More common is depression. Most people reading this will have, or will at some point, experience it. It sucks. I doubt I need to go into any explanation, but let’s just cover off the fact it isn’t just being ‘bummed out’.
During depressive periods, people will often withdraw from socialising and simplify their lives to the absolute basics – for any number of reasons, but often because anything else is simply too much to deal with.
Games are a popular safe haven for people suffering depression, in my experience. They’re reliable, don’t talk back and - if you feel a need for human connection – you can interact anonymously online with people you’ll likely make no significant connection with. Perfect!
What I’m about to write about isn’t easy. It’s an extraordinary challenge, and beyond that it is subjectively insurmountable.
Games as a means for avoidance are, in my experience and opinion, not healthy. It is vitally important that you confront your mental health issues and work to manage them – note I say manage, because many are lifelong issues and impossible to cure. It’s likely everyone will fail time and time again before finding successful management techniques for their mental health. You can’t judge the process of others from the outside, because it almost certainly appears irrational or counter-productive. When people find their way, however, their lives will change long-term, if not forever, and they’ll be stronger for it.
What I have discovered in the past few of years is I no longer use videogames as a crutch. I’m not sure when the transition happened, probably over a long period of time, but when discussing the amount of time spent playing videogames a mental health professional asked me, “why are you playing them?”
It’s a charged question; some people believe videogames can make you depressed, aggressive or anxious – that they’re the cause, not the mechanism for escape. Some people just don’t understand the appeal. Fortunately that wasn’t the case this time.
I took some time to think about my response before saying, “they’ve become an outlet for release, but where I used to play them for five, six, ten hours at a time to avoid other matters, I now play only for as long as I really want to. I don’t need to play.” Note that neither of us interpreted the word ‘need’ here as being related to addiction. That’s a kettle of fish I’m not willing to tackle.
The change may seem semantic, but in terms of how games made me feel the response was positive. Where once I felt guilty for wasting time and avoiding problems, I felt joy, stress release and calm. When dealing with any mental health issue, I think it’s important to think about any activity and how it impacts on you; work, who you spend time with, how much you drink, what drugs you do - these all impact on your state of mind. I’m no angel. Not by a long shot. I’ve focused so much on work this year I’ve done virtually no exercise, and that’s a big no-no on the mental health front.
If you do have to manage complications with your mental health, it’s good to be aware that - as I touched on earlier - there’s no consensus on how games impact our psychology. It’s my opinion this is because everyone is different. Anything is bad for you without moderation, but when you feel a genuine, intense passion for videogaming it can be hard to separate negative escapism from positive relaxation. If you work with a mental health professional to manage your issues it would undoubtedly be a good topic to bring up. Tell them about your favourite games and how they make you feel and be honest about why you play them - you never know, it could contribute positively to you mental health and improve your relationship with gaming.