Getting Your Mental Health Support While You Game
Plus three extremely short Wes Anderson movies
A what inside a where now?
Our show’s producer, Gabe Mara, is a gamer. At least much more of a gamer than I am. So he was the one who brought Hero Journey Club to our attention and that is the subject of this week’s podcast.
From the show description:
Hero Journey Club is a business that offers mental health support groups for video game enthusiasts, run by therapists. The group sessions happen over the online voice and instant messaging platform Discord and the participants, the gamers, are playing games while the sessions take place. Sometimes collaboratively on the same game, sometimes on completely different games. The group members are usually similar in age and have a shared desire to work on particular mental health issues.
We talk with the company’s co-founder and CEO, Brian Chhor, and one of the “Journey Guides,” Savannah Napier, about how all this works and why a distraction can lead to a more relaxed and deeper support experience. We also hear from some Depresh Mode listeners about games that help them.
House guests
New York Times has a feature about a town in Belgium where the locals have been taking in people with mental illnesses for a very long time.
It is an approach to psychiatric care that has gone on in Geel (pronounced “hail”) since as early as the 13th century, archives show. The locals began building a church to St. Dymphna, the patron saint of mental illness, in the mid-1300s and pilgrims flocked to Geel. They lived in the local farmers’ homesteads, where they worked the land alongside their new families.
Meg Kissinger wrote about this in the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel a couple of years ago as well.
New research available on mental health impact of elections
It indicates that anxiety levels were higher among people who followed the elections more closely. Not surprising. I always get sucked into following it closely and just about have a complete breakdown, even for the midterms. But some of the research swerved me a bit:
From SciTech Daily:
Using a two-wave panel survey of political anxiety administered two weeks before and two weeks following the 2020 election, the study found that Americans were more anxious before the election, as researchers had hypothesized. Following the election, it was those who specifically voted for Donald Trump, as well as conservatives and African Americans, who reported lower levels of anxiety.
“We found a lot of political anxiety right before the election, and that the election was an intervention to treat some of that anxiety — how much, we don’t know, because of some of the craziness around the election,” said Smith, chair and Olson Professor of political science. “But pretty much across the board, political anxiety went down following the election, and it went down surprisingly in some groups.
Seems like Trump was doing all he could to heighten the anxiety and weaponize it but maybe it was too much and his supporters just detached.
I’ve been making a thing and perhaps you’d like to hear it
So my pal Dr. Ken Duckworth has written this amazing book, You Are Not Alone: The NAMI Guide to Navigating Mental Health--With Advice from Experts and Wisdom from Real People and Families. And how many of those real people and families did he speak to for the book? Well, it was like 130 of them. I was one! My man did so much research!
So when I found out that he had done all those interviews, I wondered how those interviews were conducted. Turns out: on Zoom. Did they still have an archive of all those interviews? Turns out: yes! So shouldn’t we turn them into podcast episodes? Turns out we did!
And so we’re taking twenty of the interviews, I’m editing them down, and we’re turning them into podcasts. The first four are already up, as You Are Not Alone: Voices of Recovery
It’s been a long time since I’ve made a podcast that doesn’t feature me as host. And fortunately, Ken is a brilliantly natural host. It’s been really interesting, also, turning something that wasn’t made for broadcast into a piece of professional audio.
Wes Anderson's Staged Re-Creations of Out of Sight, Armageddon, and The Truman Show for the 1999 MTV Movie Awards
via kottke.org