Games and Depression, Helping Hand or Hindrance?

For me, games and depression go hand in hand. It seems that games and their worlds offer up a lot of positives for someone who is struggling emotionally in life. Of course something that provides distraction and happiness to a person in that frame of mind can be quite enticing, but there is also a line that can easily be crossed. This hobby can easily go from temporary solution to necessity.

As someone who has suffered from depression (and still does), I have found a lot of comfort in my games. There are so many out there, providing relief from the different aspects of this illness that seem to just drain me dry, that it’s hard not to fill the void with the pretty pictures on my screen. When I was younger, I was particularly struggling with depression, which was down to a thyroid problem. This meant that my already heightened teenage emotions were in a state of constant flux and because neither my friends nor really myself understood what was going on. I became quite detached and, well, lonely.

It was around this time that I started playing World of Warcraft and it pretty much became my everything. My insomnia was filled with endless nights of exploring Azeroth and I was never alone because someone was always online. I found a camaraderie with my guildies, some of whom were going through similar emotions to me and it felt like, for the first time, I didn’t have to constantly check myself around them. They understood that things were hard for me, in fact, I had more people looking after me then and caring about my well being than I have ever had since. Knowing that I was loved by people I’d never even met face to face was something I had never experienced and I was lucky to have stumbled on it here.

Was I ignoring my real life for this alternate reality? I don’t think so. For me, that was my real life, where I could be myself. The outside was a bad dream where things hurt a lot, I didn’t understand myself and I let people down; I would have gladly traded one for the other.

Of course there comes a point where reality can not be pushed aside anymore. Whilst the social interaction in the game boosted my confidence, it also made me more scared of facing the world, nervous that the people out there wouldn’t see me the way my guildies did.

When I started university (and getting drunk a lot), games transformed into a different problem solver for me: a procrastination, a stress evasion. My thyroid and its buddy depression wreaked havoc on my motivation, my concentration and my ability to handle stress. At this point I think I spent more time with my doggie in Albion than I did reading the never-ending stream of books that made up my English degree. Each additional deadline piled up, and as I tried to tackle my essays and found that I had somehow forgotten how to turn ideas into coherent and tangible words and sentences, I felt every inch a failure. Jumping into Fable II gave me a chance to be a hero, to accomplish goals, to win and not feel like there was something inherently wrong with my programming.

Ultimately I ended up dropping out of uni, in my second year, not able to cope with the workload on top of my job and an emotional state that felt like it was raining inside my head. I spent a lot of time with my housemate, who I bonded with over World of Warcraft, raiding and questing and my life became work/pub/game on a rinse repeat cycle. This continued throughout a very tumultuous and complicated relationship and WoW was very much a time filler for me in a period of my life that having to confront and think about my life just wasn’t an option.

You might be thinking by now that my conclusion to all this above information is that gaming was probably a hindrance for me; an easy distraction, stopping me from moving forward and progressing as a human. Sure, it probably partly was, but it also gave me joy when my joy was limited. That’s something that became even more prevalent for me after I had a child and found myself in a situation where my physical friendship group was almost non-existent and the majority of my time was spent in the company of a smaller, more demanding version of myself.

As soon as my son was asleep it was me time. Time to open the laptop and get some hours in where I didn’t have to be a responsible, extremely lonely adult. Two friends in particular made my life bearable through the means of online socialising - it was the one thing I looked forward to every day and when it wasn’t available to me I laid in bed and was swallowed up in a whole hive of nothing, bees of no hope buzzing around, making me dizzy. I’m not sure that without my regular interruption of gaming where I was momentarily lifted out above the clouds, that I would have made it through that particular obstacle course part of life.

So you see, throughout a decade of both playing videogames and dealing with almost crippling depression the one constant was the space I had when I wasn’t in reality. That pause, the recharge the chance to take a deep breath between dives. Perhaps for someone stronger than myself it could have been a hindrance, a shackle holding them back from their freedom. For me though, it really has been a helping hand, a boost, albeit a tiny one, each time I play edging me closer to the top of that ladder and onto the next trial.

For now, I’m lucky. I’m in a good place, with good friends and my depression taking a nap 85% of the time, but I still do find myself, when things get overwhelming, indulging in some binge gaming. So the next time you see someone you think is overdoing it, before you assume they’re hiding, maybe they’re just trying to survive - chances are you might wanna cut them some slack.