I checked my Google Alerts this morning as I usually do, and I happened upon an article about a mental health charity called Take This that “aims to ease mental illness stigmas by promoting acceptance, treatment, and safe spaces” in the gaming community.

As someone who loves playing video games, it’s refreshing to see a new area of focus for mental health. I feel like the gaming community is at great risk for misconceptions about mental health, namely from the games that are out there, and Take This aims to create a better understanding of the fictionalization of mental illness.

Take This wants to work with game developers to make sure there is a more accurate portrayal of mental illness and symptoms related to it. Helping gamers and developers alike understand what’s real and what’s not in these portrayals will help wash away some of the stigma surrounding mental illness.

 

 

“With education on mental illness, people are better able to understand that the portrayals they see of conditions like anxiety, depression, and schizophrenia in games are fictionalized and not representative of everyone’s experiences. They’re done for dramatic effect, to draw the player into a fictional world, and through education we can separate the dramatized stories from real experiences.”

I, myself, have played a couple games that deal with strong themes of mental illness. The one with the heaviest theme is American McGee’s Alice and its sequel Alice: Madness Returns. I can’t really say the portrayals of mental illness are positive, nor are the specific illnesses clearly defined. Alice is just “crazy,” and she has to fight off the “madness” with the aid of violent offensive weapons in order to destroy it. Though the game is very beautifully designed and has a great storyline, it is a drastic misrepresentation of what mental illness is like, even from the perspective of 19th century London.

Although I can’t say that I agree with Take This on adding “appropriate ratings” on games to clearly state that the depictions of mental illness in the game are fictional (it seems fairly obvious if you educate yourself), I do support their endeavors to educate the gaming community on the true nature of mental illness. I don’t feel like different ratings would really do much good, but I think rating more games as “Mature” would at least cut down the number of people buying games that are too, well, mature for them.

Take This aims to “offer consultation and real information” to game developers so that they can change the way they design the game to include a more realistic portrayal of mental illness; however, they insist they are not there to change them so much that video games become a way to diagnose or act as a therapist for gamers. Including accurate information is simply meant to change how we think about mental illness in video games. Portraying mental illness as it truly is will help wipe away much of the stigma that surrounds it to change people’s perceptions of it as “something scary” to a more sympathetic, realistic one.