I have no PTSD, but I recently lost my job, and while I am looking for another one I decided to use the time off in order to stop smoking, so far it's been a bit more than 3 weeks, and I think it's been the period I've been playing the most videogames since high school, it is really useful to overcome temporary cravings by doing something that doesn't require much mental efforts but still keeps the mind busy to don't think about smoking, every day I am suffering less and less, and I think without videogames it would have been much harder.

Keep in mind, I'm 37 years old and have smoked since I was 13

That's a highly compassionate reason to get into an industry, bravo.

Is there a specific type of game you found healing, or especially one that you prefer to create for such a purpose?

I personally strangely find a mix of 'brain turn off' games such as ARPGs healing but then can also find great peace in crushing my brain through another Factorio run.

Don’t worry about grandstanding, it’s not.

It’s good to have found an angle that you care about and can apply yourself to.

This is a really nice way of explaining it and I didn’t consider it before despite being a very heavy gamer at one point.

Do you wish for the Star Trek AR game with the tubes gobbling up the discs, and the mind control side effect?

It seemed mildly compelling, and Tetris like.

* https://www.popularmechanics.com/culture/tv/a13595750/star-t...

As somebody who is currently experiencing depression/anxiety can you talk more on what happened with you and how you improved?

Hey, any chance you would be into connecting and talking about healing trough playing games?

From the conclusion:

> Playing “Tetris” after viewing traumatic material reduces unwanted, involuntary memory flashbacks to that traumatic film, leaving deliberate memory recall of the event intact.

This was my first thought when I saw the title. Lots of rapid eye movement and stimulation alongside therapy might release some of the stored trauma.

From your link:

> There is debate about how the therapy works and whether it is more effective than other established treatments.[3][9] The eye movements have been criticized as having no scientific basis.[10] The founder promoted the therapy for the treatment of PTSD, and proponents employed untestable hypotheses to explain negative results in controlled studies.[11] EMDR has been characterized as a pseudoscientific purple hat therapy (i.e., only as effective as its underlying therapeutic methods without any contribution from its distinctive add-ons).[12]

I always assumed EMDR's effectiveness had nothing to do with eye movements.

Article says rotation is a crucial operation to the purpose.

Kind of related, the days when I pick weeds from my lawn I’ll see the weeds for hours when I close my eyes or even just flashes with my eyes open. I guess the weed picking activity stresses my pattern recognition and it continues working afterwards. Very trippy, at least for regular garden weeds.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetris_effect

The only time I've ever lucid dreamed was when I played an obscene amount of tetris, and I could actually play games in my sleep. Like games that followed the rules, falling pieces randomy, I could rotate them, lines would disappear, the whole thing. It was really really wild.

"With just one guided treatment session, we saw positive effects that persisted after five weeks and even six months after treatment."

The state shown in the image is not even from tetris game. Probably a shooting game.

More HN-esque:

  ssh playnetris.com

somehow? curious what you consider to be real ptsd vs. what you consider the trauma that front line health care workers faced during one of the worst Healthcare crises of our lifetimes.

Are you seriously so abysmally bad at empathy that you’re unaware that doctors and nurses the world over watched millions of people die very often in agony, while forcible isolated from their loved ones, during the first year of Covid?

Being forced by your job to watch someone suffocate is, definitionally, a real trauma that can easily cause very real PTSD. Going back in and watching that same story play out hundreds of times, especially in the early days before anyone had figured out effective treatments, would cause real PTSD in any human being with even an absolutely minimal capacity for empathy.

Guess the point of studies, is to prove something is or is-not non-sense.

There are a lot of different treatments for PTSD, it doesn't have to be only one. So if ketosis works for some people, that doesn't mean video games can't work for others. So if it helps some, it isn't non-sense.

I think Ketosis sounds interesting, I'd hope someone would do a study on that also. Since it seems like Ketosis has been shown to help a variety of conditions, even if PTSD wasn't singled out.

Here is a positive one on Ketosis. https://med.stanford.edu/news/all-news/2024/04/keto-diet-men...

Belief is irrelevant, it’s what evidence exists for that matters. Any intervention for PTSD that has an evidentiary basis and consistent effect across multiple studies is good. There is a tiny bit of that building behind Tetris as an intervention for traumatic experiences, including evidence that it may help prevent conversion of traumatic experiences into post-traumatic mental illness; be glad for that because it means people in the future may not develop PTSD at all. By any measure that potential preventative effect is more important than treatments that only work (if they work at all) for people who already have developed it, so Tetris is getting some serious research study… good, nothing to be frustrated about here. If ketosis worked for you, great, but there’s little more than exactly that anecdotal evidence yet, it needs time and investigation too.

There doesn't have to be a single silver bullet for PTSD. The beauty of science and medicine is that we can explore multiple avenues simultaneously. Ketosis has shown promise for some, including you, which is great. However, different people respond differently to treatments. Instead of pitting methods against each other, why not advocate for a more inclusive approach? Embracing multiple methods makes sense because PTSD is complex and affects individuals differently. The goal should be to find what works best for each individual, not to win a treatment popularity contest. Let's push for more research into all promising methods. That way, we can build a more comprehensive understanding of PTSD treatment options and hopefully help more people find relief.