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You are given a series of everyday life events and have to attempt to manage your illness, relationships, job, and possible treatment. Depression Quest – This is an interactive fiction game where you play as someone living with depression.Here are a few of the games that have been designed to help manage depression, anxiety, and other mental health problems: None of them would be a good replacement for therapy, and they aren’t intended to be, but in between sessions or when you’re on a waiting list, they might help. In some cases, the research has even included input from people who have a mental health diagnosis, to make sure that the game is as useful for them as it’s intended to be. Some companies have taken therapeutic gaming to a completely new level by designing games that are intended to help people develop coping strategies for dealing with mental illness. When older adults played the game regularly, they were able to maintain more cognitive functioning than non-gamers, which has the potential to make them safer drivers (a little counter-intuitive when you think about the content of the game, but OK.) One study suggested that playing Tetris in the few hours after a traumatic event might reduce flashbacks from a traumatic event.Īnother study found that some people with learning disabilities found that gaming increased their performance on attention tasks.Įven Grand Theft Auto has its benefits. The research on violence and video games is a lot more complicated than that, but one trend is clear: Video games have a lot of potential uses as part of therapy.