RPGs and mental health issues

[Cor Azer]

Six out of twelve seems statistically significant.

Depends on how they were selected.

Not to describe your group, but if I picked players from, say, a mental illness support group, having a high percentage of people with mental health issues would not be significant.

 

[Aeolius]

I'm not aware of any RPG data - but there's a stack of evidence that face-to-face social contacts and friendships are good for health and mental health.

Offline gaming? They still allow that? To be fair, my last face to face game was in 1994. I've been running chat-based and play-by-post games since 1995. IRL I am married and have 7 kids, a job, and a hobby farm to tend to. Online gaming seems to be my most available outlet, these days.

My current game has been running since mid-2007. Granted, as the game is chat-based, I have often wondered if all of my players are not in fact the same 48-year old man living in his mother's basement.

Back to the topic at hand, I have always empathized with this particular quote from an article about Dopamine Systems in Highly Creative People Similar to That Seen in Schizophrenics : "Thinking outside the box might be facilitated by having a somewhat less intact box"

 

[El Mahdi]

I know my experience is only anecdotal (though I guess everybody else's, including the OP's, are too), but I've actually seen the opposite.

Of the gamers I've gamed with (probably somewhere around 40 total...I know, that's probably not very many), most were military or military spouses, and only two were what I would call regular drinkers (though not alcoholics). The rest were either very occasional drinkers, or didn't drink at all.

To be honest, one of the reasons a lot of us got together to play RPG's, is because we didn't want to do the typical weekend thing of getting drunk (too too many people I've known in the military lived exactly this way...though I will say they are not the majority of those in the military).

For the most part (with the exception of one guy's wife), everyone I've gamed with has been basically normal and definitely stable.

 

[Guest 85555]

My two current groups include:

3 - Clinically depressed.
1 - Autistic.
1 - Bipolar.
1 - Cocaine addict.

Six out of twelve seems statistically significant. Going back over my groups since the late 90s, the percentage seems to stay constant; even after changing cities three times in the interim.

Drug addiction is fairly common. If one out of the 12 is an addict, i doubt that is that different from the general poplation. Depression affects 10% of the population, so 3 out of 12 is higher than normal, but that is probably just your group (and are these people genuinely depressed because there is a big difference from the blues and clinical depression, with many people diagnosing themselves). Bi polar disorder is something like 3% of the population, so 1 out of 12 doesn't seem all that bad really.

But all this said I think your groups is very atypical. This has not been my experience at all.

 

[nedjer]

Offline gaming? They still allow that? To be fair, my last face to face game was in 1994. I've been running chat-based and play-by-post games since 1995. IRL I am married and have 7 kids, a job, and a hobby farm to tend to. Online gaming seems to be my most available outlet, these days.

My current game has been running since mid-2007. Granted, as the game is chat-based, I have often wondered if all of my players are not in fact the same 48-year old man living in his mother's basement.

Back to the topic at hand, I have always empathized with this particular quote from an article about Dopamine Systems in Highly Creative People Similar to That Seen in Schizophrenics : "Thinking outside the box might be facilitated by having a somewhat less intact box"

Online tabletop gaming might predict similar benefits, as people apparently value online goods, possessions and relationships as much as offline.

f2f tabletop happens to fit well with studies about proximity, 'best friends' and frequency of contact. Can't remember it all, but close friends living nearby is win

7 kids that'd put my dopamine systems through the roof.

 

[GandalfMithrandir]

[sblock=story of my messed up friends lives (condensed to include mostly relevant information]In my group, which is basically comprised of a lot of the kids at my school that don't really fit in very well, I've had two people that smoked weed regularly, one of them was also an underage alcoholic, one of my people suffers from severe depression, due to bad/misunderstanding parents, and cuts herself a lot and has actually passed out at the table from a lack of blood before, another one of my people attempted suicide by sticking a rifle in his mouth but just blew out his cheek instead. Another former member of my group who graduated last year had a personality disorder, I'm not sure which one it was but he was always pulling pranks on people, which is not normal. Yet another was addicted to pretty much all the drugs he could find (Vicadin, Meth, Pot, Crack, Acid, heroin if he could find it, and adderall, which is not normally a bad drug but he didn't have ADD and didn't need it at all), or at least he was last time I talked to him back in 9th grade. He might have eased up a little bit, as he does have a stable girlfriend now, or she might just be really accepting.[/sblock]

So in terms of numbers, 6 out of my 13 people who have been in my face to face group have had serious issues, but I also know a lot of people who aren't in my group that are perfectly normal, and I think what makes my group different, is that because we don't really have a whole lot of other friends, and meet in the school's basement, that the group that I have isn't an accurate representation of the gaming community in general, because it actually probably represents more accurately the people at school who don't fit in elsewhere.

GM

 

[Lwaxy]

I don't think my groups are representative because I kinda went out of my way to pick up a few players who had issues in other groups - like the guy with Tourette who was asked to leave 2 groups before. Not sure if this particular guy would qualify as mental issue because he's more stable than most of the others, he just has those ticks.

 

[Umbran]

Six out of twelve seems statistically significant.

It may seem that way, but it isn't. Really, that's not how statistics works. That 12 is too small a sample to expect it to be representative. The smaller the sample, the more likely it is to deviate significantly from the average of the population.

And that's just thinking about random error. There's also systematic error - how do you come by the folks you game with? How you choose them may predispose you to getting a particular type of person in your group.

For example, let us say you are gaming in high school. All your gamers are fellow high school students, right? If you looked at your groups as representative, you'd probably come to the conclusion that gamers are, by and large, emotionally immature. But is that because of the type of people who choose gaming, or the type of people who are in high school?

 

[GandalfMithrandir]

It may seem that way, but it isn't. Really, that's not how statistics works. That 12 is too small a sample to expect it to be representative. The smaller the sample, the more likely it is to deviate significantly from the average of the population.

And that's just thinking about random error. There's also systematic error - how do you come by the folks you game with? How you choose them may predispose you to getting a particular type of person in your group.

Mostly unrelated tangent:
I took Stats last semester and have subsequently forgotten what the parameters were for a binomial situation, but I think 30 MIGHT be the minimum number, I will look this up in my old notes that are stashed somewhere and edit this post, but in any case 12 is pretty small for a group, when I had to do my project for nerf accuracy with different barrel extensions I did 200 shots with each barrel and I still didn't feel like it was right[/tangent]

Carry on

GM

 

[Kzach]

I DON'T HAVE A MENTAL ISSUE!

*twitch*