![]() ![]() It has its own graphic novels, comic books, and Amazon Prime animated series voiced by the original cast, who are all professional voice actors.īut for O’Brien, D&D is primarily “the most fun I’d had in years.” Research hasn’t definitely uncovered why, she said, but with all of those factors combined, D&D “really does seem to be an incredibly powerful tool.”įor Liam O’Brien, the collaborative storytelling that’s inherent to D&D is “just good soul building and good friend building.” He’s one of the founding stars of Critical Role, one of the most well-known D&D streaming shows out there. The skills used in most games like D&D – “telling stories, being social, being creative, practicing math, practicing reading – all of those things are really, really helpful” for someone struggling with their mental health, Connell said. “Not just Dungeons & Dragons, any of them.” She chalks that up to the Satanic Panic of the 1980s, which demonized D&D as leading to violence and satanic rituals.īut as she’s found while working on “Tabletop Roleplaying Therapy,” her upcoming book about the applications of D&D and similar games in therapy, the people who play such games report real benefits. “There’s not a lot of research on tabletop roleplaying games in general” as therapeutic tools, she explained. In the same way that music or art can be used as a therapy tool, Connell has found that she can use D&D to help her clients learn new skills and grow as people. “For those who play music, sometimes listening to music or playing music can be incredibly therapeutic,” Connell said. Her background is in music therapy, a form of applied therapy, which takes “a tool that’s not necessarily intended to be therapy and therapeutic methods through that tool.” Megan Connell, a licensed and board certified clinical psychologist who practices in North Carolina. “D&D isn’t therapy, but it is therapeutic,” she said. Nevermind if the team-building exercise is fending off an imaginary goblin horde. “There’s something very healing in sitting with people and going ‘We will work together,’” Iyengar said. If a player is going through a rough time, she can choose whether to throw them a session of the game that leans more heavily on roleplaying their character and working through those issues, or she can choose to throw them a villain to battle until they get a win. The murder of George Floyd, and the resulting protests “for the right to exist” as a Black woman, added extra frustration.ĭungeons & Dragons gave her the “ability to have shared communal experiences… during one of the hardest mental things I’ve ever had to deal with.” That, for her, was “sanity saving.”Īnd as someone who first dove into the topic of mental health to learn best practices for her own ADHD, she’s learned to check in on “other people and where they’re at mentally” as they play their sessions, in the same way she checks on her own emotions and reactions to her brain processing the world differently. “I am an extrovert, so the idea of truly being away from people, for years at a time, was EXTREMELY bad for my mental health” during the pandemic, Iyengar explained. Since then, the characters she’s created, for different games on livestreams and outside them, have helped her learn more about herself, and provided an outlet for connection and distraction in times when both things were hard to come by. Iyengar started playing D&D in 2015 or 2016. One roll of the 20-sided dice can determine how a player’s decision impacts the story, and what happens as a result. While D&D on its own isn’t a replacement for psychotherapy with a licensed professional, it does provide a social, creative and emotional outlet that some players find invaluable for their mental health.įor Aabria Iyengar, a tabletop roleplay gamer who plays in and runs storylines on several popular D&D-based podcasts and live streams, books and movies are fun, but “there’s nothing quite like being inside the adventure.”īeing inside the adventure is the goal of Dungeons & Dragons, which boils down to a fantasy-themed choose your own adventure story, with a group of players acting as the characters, and one “Dungeon Master” acting as the referee.
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