Depression and anxiety are common mental disorders for many people. These can be difficult to deal with, as lots of people don’t want to go to therapy based on perception of it, or just can’t. In these situations, video games can be a enjoyable thing to increase happiness and improve mental health.
The article ‘Gaming Your Mental Health: A Narrative Review on Mitigating Symptoms of Depression and Anxiety Using Commercial Video Games’ gives information about the use of video games with mental health. They note that there are other ways to get help, such as therapy and such, but they also note the issues with that, such as costs. They also say how non-commercial video games are already used for therapy and mental health, and shows many people feel their mental health has been positively affected by them.
Video games can, of course, have some negative effects if not kept in check, such as sleep deprivation and vision problems. However, those things only could happen if the person playing video games is not making sure they are on a good schedule and not playing too much. Positives of video games are they can form a community online with others with similar interests, they are often quite accessible, and they are good at making people not bored.
Therapy is an existing solution, but there are some issues with it. First, not everybody wants to talk about their problems, and therapy doesn’t work unless you are open to sharing. Therapy also has a bad reputation of not being very cool and many people just don’t want to go simply because of how it is perceived, even if they need it, as they don’t want to be judged. Another reason is that it is simply too expensive. Therapy can be 300 USD in the United States, which is far too much monthly. Even when there is free therapy, there will be so many people applying to have a session it could take weeks if not months to get to talk with a therapist to even diagnose depression.
Because of those reasons, video games can be pretty useful, as they are entertaining, and when you aren’t constantly thinking about being depressed, you are less depressed. Community is also a thing that many people want, and it helps talking to people when you are not feeling great. Also, video games are more accessible than therapy, as there are plenty of games that are cheap and still good. Video games are helpful to mental health, though of course overusing video games isn’t good either, most things have a point where doing them that much is unhealthy, so that wouldn’t be something video games alone deal with.
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