Video games can save lives
How DeusEx helped with depression
CONTENT/TRIGGER WARNING: This issue of LFG: Learning from Games contains descriptions about someone’s experience with major depressive disorder. Please feel free to skip this issue if you aren’t comfortable with the topic.
Hello JOMT Reader!
Happy New Year and welcome to 2025! I hope you all had a restful holiday season. I know that it isn’t always a stress-free time, but I hope that you had some time to recharge (and play some games!). I’m well on my way to finally building my long overdue PC, so I can get back into more gaming!
The first issue of 2025 is an important but heavy theme: mental health. With all the stigmas regarding mental health issues embedded in society, it’s difficult to start a conversation without stress or anxiety or fear of judgement. Fortunately, in Canada, the Bell Let’s Talk initiative is in its 15th year of dedicating a day in January (Jan. 22, 2025) to talk about mental health.
While initiatives like Bell Let’s Talk have helped to normalize talking about mental health issues, there are other stigmas and societal expectations roadblocking people from talking freely. One of those roadblocks, perhaps surprisingly, is what I would call an unhealthy obsession with the concept of a stereotypical male (sometimes called hegemonic masculinity). In this view, the archetypal male is expected to show emotional stoicism, strength, toughness, resilience, and competitiveness.
Mental health flies in the face of all of these archetypes because as I’ve heard many times, “it’s all in the mind.” While the main organ affected by mental health is the brain (or mind), there are real and sometimes devastating physical consequences. So, first-hand accounts of someone’s struggle with depression like the one I am sharing today, are the small steps we need to take to slowly breakdown hegemonic masculinity and normalize talking about mental health.
Depression is constant and debilitating
The author of this autobiographical analysis is Dr. Nicholas Norman Adams. Since this is a first-hand account of Dr. Adams’ experience, there will be a lot of quoted passages from the research article that he published — where appropriate, I’ve included my own emphasis (in bold).
Dr. Adams was first diagnosed with major depressive disorder when he was 18, but writes that he had been experiencing mental health conditions before the diagnosis. For someone (like me) who has not experienced mental health issues, sometimes it’s hard to grasp just how debilitating depression can be. But the following description does a pretty good job:
I felt a constant, crushing notion of being completely weighted down, of being suffocated by a dark figure of immeasurable pressure that could crush the air from my lungs, pressure my heart into a rapid-pounding anxiety, and squeeze my muscles and bones into an inertia: someone sitting on your shoulders, with their legs wrapped firmly around your chest—a feeling impossible to shake off. It felt like this 24 hours a day: constant.
Dr. Adams further describes this period of time as “the most memorable, devastating, and frightening experience of major depressive disorder (MDD) I' have had to date.”
I can’t imagine what depression feels like, but I can imagine what the description above feels like. And to feel that pressure and anxiety constantly would be debilitating to say the least. Fortunately, video games came to the rescue.
DeusEx changed the course of depression
I should clarify that video games weren’t just thrust onto Dr. Adams in a last ditch effort to treat depression. As he describes it, playing video games was a choice, an effortful one at that, amidst the other treatments he was undergoing at the time. I call attention to it because I don’t want to reduce or minimize the effort it took Dr. Adams to go from passively receiving treatment to actively seeking treatment.
A quiet night with headphones and a newly de-dusted PC with DeusEx transported Dr. Adams into its world.
DeusEx was immediately enthralling to me, and I recall playing it that first night for hours, until the light began to filter through the blinds and I realized I had lost track of time. This was a turning point for me, a realization. That I had lost track of time meant that I hadn’t been focusing on how I felt.
I’ve written in the past about escape from reality as a motivator for playing games. It’s also one of the motivations that can be a double-edged sword, often associated with gaming disorder. But in this case, it was exactly what was needed to jump-start the recovery process for Dr. Adams.
…the primary positive effect I experienced was escapism: a vicarious living through the actions of a digital character in a virtual-world of high stimulation and dynamic change that required constant focus.
This is a deeply personal effect — not everyone will benefit from DeusEx or experience escape in the same way. Dr. Adams notes that the setting, mood, even colours used in the game closely matched what he was experiencing at the time. The experience in the game matched his real-world emotions, which allowed him to connect more personally.
When we think about playing a game, a lot of us approach it as something to finish or accomplish — often playing from start to end credits. But it isn’t the only way to play a game. For some, enjoying the game world, making new discoveries, or just watching events unfold, can be just as fun and rewarding as rolling end credits. I mention this because for Dr. Adams, playing DeusEx wasn’t about completing it: it was about being immersed in that game world.
I would often spend time simply existing within the game-world, wandering, conversing with characters, and reading in-game materials, at times, advancing small side-quests but mostly enjoying the distractions of the virtual-world.
I’ve gotten back into No Man’s Sky for precisely that reason — to enjoy the distractions of the many worlds I could visit. In the Shadow of Mordor series, I could lure two rival Orcs to bump into each other as they were chasing me, at which point I would watch from a safe distance.
In the context of treatments for disease, this immersion effect is powerful because you don’t necessarily need to be skilled to be immersed in the game world. Anyone can, under the right circumstances, benefit from immersion.
Considerations for a mentally healthy future
Dr. Adams continued his treatments and playing DeusEx. Around the fifth month of treatments and second month of playing, Dr. Adams was applying for jobs again after being away for almost half a year. Although the medications continued, Dr. Adams was on the road to recovery.
This particular road was littered with the roadblocks of hegemonic masculinity where
…most discussions of MI I attempted saw my dialogues attributed to engaging in displays of “over-emotional,” “sensitive,” and “strange” subject matter that depicted and confirmed a failure of the supposed male stoic character: the slipping of a mask that should be upheld…
and
…to be depressed was to cease being a man in any acceptable or recognizable form for this temporal–social context and societal bubble.
Although Dr. Adams analyzed his experiences from this perspective, there are aspects of the hegemonic masculine viewpoint that applies to anyone suffering from mental health concerns. Many mental health issues, like depression and addiction, are still labeled as “all in the mind” and stigmatized as such.
Unfortunately, I don’t have a panacea to make the stigma go away and magically create a safe space for people to talk about their mental health concerns without fear, stress, or anxiety. The thing I’m doing for now, is to amplify stories and analyses, like Dr. Adams’, in the hope that more will follow in his footsteps.
Final remarks
Every year, I am reminded about the patients lives that are impacted when they get the treatment they need (as part of my day job). And that is what excites me about Dr. Adams’ autobiographical analysis about the impact of video gaming on mental health. The hope — and lifeline — that video games can represent is why I will continue to share stories/research like this.
I’ll leave you with a quote from Dr. Adams, attaching to it my greatest hope that it speaks to those who need it:
I had escaped [depression]. This possibility excited me for the first time in nearly 4 months.
If you want to read more about this study, you can access the article here for free: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/10497323241307193
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