No matter the wealth of research that exists today, from an idiosyncratic perspective it is in many respects the elusive Unknown, and that as a result it's inevitable that it will be feared, at least to an extent. No matter to what degree, experiencing mental illness for the first time is scary. However, I feel a separate line of thought is being neglected in the process, and that these thoughts should co-exist alongside the idea that, yes, mental illness is scary. Examples such as the above are undoubtedly invaluable to the discussion. It's only as a result of my own experiences with mental illness in recent years that my outlook has shifted slightly.
I've long held the view that, as a persuasive and interactive medium, video games are unique and therefore owe even more to the conversation against other media. It ran its fourth consecutive event in November 2016 and gets bigger year-upon-year. Asylum is a 48-hour game jam with just one rule: "You should not use asylums, psychiatric institutes, medical professionals or violent/antipathic/'insane' patients as settings or triggers" in crafting games. Off the back of this piece and others, ex-games writer-turned-game dev Lucy Morris launched Asylum Jam that same year. Within, Maher challenges video games' interpretation of mental illness and suggests that as popular media drives popular beliefs, "which lead to reinforcement, adaptation or abandonment of stigmatic views", games have an onus to be more responsible in their depictions of mental illness. In 2013, Ian Maher wrote a fantastic article for Kotaku, entitled "Nobody Wins When Horror Games Stigmatize Mental Illness".
This is, for the most part, a good thing. Recent years have seen a number of articles and initiatives within the video game sphere challenge these misconceptions in a bid to balance the scales. To this end, countless horror books, movies, and of course video games are set within dehumanizing and/or outmoded representations of psychiatric hospitals. This unhelpful correlation perpetuates mental illness as The Unknown, and as such something to be feared-which appears to be the rhetoric, or perhaps even the rationale, for pedaling enduring misconstrued stereotypes.
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