How Video Games Explore Mental Illness

Hi! Jess... Loved your video... Its all inspiring... And as a Psichologyst from Bolivia im totally agree with all the things you portrayed in this video... Maybe as a suggestion... You can do a countdown of the best videogames with psichologycal content?? Or maybe more ambicious... Make countdowns of best games for distinct categories of mental illnnes like: anxiety, depression, P. D. and schizophrenia... Ill be expectating... Muchas gracias por tu trabajo!!!

By talking to GameSpot staff. Your free now Danny.

The crap 15 second ads that are the SAME ad, before a video clip are making me mentally ill.

Nice article

American McGee's Alice.

Thank you, Jess, for making this video. I find it very comforting knowing that there are many people like me and that the theme of mental health is becoming less of a taboo.

Great piece, Jess.

I work as a rehabilitation counselor for people living with and recovering from severe mental illness, mostly schizophrenia, bipolor disorder, schizoaffective disorder, major depressive disorder, OCD, etc. The biggest external struggle my clients face is misunderstanding from the general public, be it a potential employer or just an average Joe fearful of unusual behavior they witness in a grocery store.

I attribute this in part to natural human reaction to something different, to a lack of general education on the subject, and then in large part the entertainment industry's use of people with mental illness as serial killers, ghost whisperers or similarly dehumanized and romanticized characters. Split, I suppose, is the most recent film to muddy the waters on DID.

The gaming industry certainly hasn't shied away from this trope. I can remember seeing it as far back as Sierra's "The Colonel's Bequest" (which I won't spoil here even though its probably almost 30 years old) and its still a common go-to trope today.

I'm glad to see there are game developers exploring mental illness as it is rather than serving up the same old spooky, magical, or enigmatic experiences they usually put on our plates. Glad to see game journalists like you taking on the topic as well.

Cheers

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sU7YLkTQuJU

7 more games that dealt with the topic well.

How is Life is Strange not talked about here????????

That's a major example of a game, a breakthrough, of how games can treat mental illness.

https://femhype.com/2015/08/19/be-kind-you-cant-rewind-trauma-mental-illness-in-life-is-strange/

Does Gamespot (and IGN) simply put, ignore this game while everyone else still talks about it?

Mental illnesses in video games are depicted in unrealistic manner most of the time, its just spreading more disinformation in an already stigmatized branch of medicine(psychiatry) for the sake of entertainment.

I don't think you can qualify the FC 3 and 4 antagonist as someone with mental illness. They are sociopaths, it is qualified as one, but I think its just the worlds over diagnosis of things. A sociopath is usually shaped by their experience in life; but so is everyone else. Sociopath is only considered a mental illness because the things that shape those people are usually traumatic events. Whereas someone shaped by positive/normal non traumatic events is just considered "regular"

At the end of the day games are made for entertainment, you can say it doesn't have to be "fun" to entertain--but that's the simplest way to entertain. And generally speaking, nothing about the reality of mental illness would be considered fun. So I think its something the medium could ever effectively approach. On a side note, speaking about games with mental illness--what happened to Hellblade?

Iv been wheelchair bound almost my whole life, because of this anxiety, depression and bipolar are some things I deal with. Beyond the the reason I am in the chair, I have a condition that makes my bones weaker than a normal person. Think of joker from mass effect. Same thing just worse. I actually would like to see game's adress people who have to live in wheelchairs, or physical disabilities. They touch on it in the sly Cooper game's with Bentley being paralyzed and in mgs tpp, but otherwise you don't see like in a gta or any open world game let alone any other where you have people who are disabled around like everyone else.