March 2013
1 post
Take This Project at PAX East
“It’s Dangerous to Go Alone” is an hour of information and sharing about mental health issues, moderated by our own Dr. Mark with guest speakers from the Take This membership.
Join us at 2pm ET on Friday, March 22 in the Wyvern theater for a good talk, some fun and a little advice.
From the PAX panel description: “Our internet culture encourages participation but can...
February 2013
1 post
Anxiety Is An Illusion
by: Russ Pitts
You think you’re having a heart attack. That’s the first thing you notice. The second thing you notice is that you’re dying.
Anxiety attacks come in a variety of shapes in sizes, but that’s how mine usually work: I think I’m dying. And then it gets worse, because becoming aware of what’s happening to me makes what’s happening worse.
...
January 2013
1 post
The Box in the Garden
by: Anonymous
This is my experience of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, many, many years after the damage was done. It’s like living in a beautiful garden, green, diverse, cared for only by me. There’s soft grass, flowering plants, young trees, ornate, homemade furniture and creepers that have climbed high rock walls, over the years. There’s no door to the garden, no windows, just some metal...
December 2012
7 posts
You Can't Keep It Within You
by: Patrick Scott Patterson
I’ve been there. That feeling of being alone, feeling like the world wouldn’t care if you were around or not. Oh, yes … I have been there, and it is a big reason why I got into gaming in the first place. I could dive into a game for a while and only have the pressures of that world to worry about until I was out of continues. Then it would creep back. While I...
I didn't expect I'd feel so alone
by: Anonymous
I used to work 40 hours a week in an office surrounded by something like 35 people. I wouldn’t call more than a handful of the middle-aged women in the sea of cubicles around mine genuine friends. And we weren’t exactly the Beatles. We didn’t hang out after hours. I ate lunch in my car every day because I enjoyed stealing time for myself. I had a j-o-b, not a...
Stuffing
by: Anonymous
I have a friend - a kind, reasonable man - who doesn’t understand anxiety. He’d like to, because he knows I suffer from it and would really like to be supportive, but he just doesn’t get it. Sadness, he could relate to, or anger, but the thing that leaves me huddled in a corner on my bathroom floor, shrieking and crying … that, he can’t quite get. And it’s not his fault,...
The Lessons of the Litany
by: John Peter Grant
The most useful advice I’ve ever encountered comes from a book set thousands of years in the future on the desert planet of Arrakis. In the opening pages of his masterpiece Dune, Frank Herbert introduces us to the Litany Against Fear: I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to...
What Depression Is
by: Mikey Neumann
In the end, your heart is the thing that takes you.
I’m about to put myself out there — like Star Trek out there — because right now I need the one escape that always seems to bring me back. When everything becomes overwhelming and blindingly consequential, you lose track of the ground, and everyone needs his or her own gravity.
Writing is gravity in my world. Family is...
Being Smart is Sometimes Miserable
by: Trent Polack
Hi, I’m Trent. I was originally a programmer, then a programming book author, did a stint working on a program to monitor satellite data, went to the University of Michigan to teach High School English, then ended up making games for the last six-ish years (for the record, teaching is still my goal, but, you know… student loans).
Fun side note: I’m also a...
Depression Was a Prison
by: Sean Sands
I was angry all the time. Anger was my constant companion, this indiscriminate, stomach-grinding, head-pounding fury that bubbled like lava under tectonic shifts in my mood and disposition. Worst of all, I didn’t know what the anger was, why it was there or even if it would ever go away, so I lived with it. I lived with it for years.
It turns out, depression isn’t a thing you...
November 2012
10 posts
"Cootie"
by: Colette Bennett
A purple-haired girl named Nei was one of my first friends. She was beautiful, with pointed, elfen ears and shy eyes. She didn’t talk back, but she didn’t need to. When I played Phantasy Star II, she was the one I felt closest to. She’d gone through a tough past, and she was quiet, but I could tell she was the kind of person I wanted to know in real life. I even used to...
Remembering Matt Hughes
by: dreadfulblog
About four weeks ago Matt Hughes’ death was all but passed over thanks to another industry talking point that’s bellyached its way to top of games journalists’ list of professional tragedies.
Hughes was a freelance games journalist whose work appeared on Joystiq and GamesRadar among other sites. His apparent suicide, which was first reported all the way back at the beginning of...
For Sally
by: Jay Henningsen
My exposure to people suffering from depression has been a long, strange trip. Several members of my mother’s side of the family have struggled with various degrees of clinical depression and Seasonal Affective Disorder for large portions of their lives. As an adolescent, I honestly never really paid much attention to their problems. Depression was a non-issue for me,...
Get Over It
by: Jay Posey
No one ever told me depression felt so much like anger.
Not an explosive anger, or even a focused one. Just a low-intensity burn, always simmering beneath the surface. A pressure, like someone sitting on my chest.
And boredom.
Never interested in what I was doing, never looking forward to whatever would come afterwards. All I wanted to do was nothing. But even sitting...
I'll Never be a Normal Person
by: Anonymous
When I was 12 or 13, I told my parents I was really stressed out. I don’t remember why I said it, but I remember lying in bed every night, wide awake, my mind racing with worries that would probably seem absurd now, and I couldn’t make it stop. I didn’t know how to describe this, because I didn’t know that there was a difference between everyday stress and more serious anxiety,...
4 tags
People Are Important
by: Pete Davison
People are important.
That knowledge didn’t really sink in until two years ago, when I really needed them. And they came through, probably saving my life in the process.
Some context first of all: I have struggled with depression, social anxiety and self-esteem issues for as long as I can remember, though it’s only relatively recently that I’ve come to...
4 tags
Welcome to the Take This Project
by: Russ Pitts
I was never a big believer in mental illness.
I would know people who would say they had problems, or who would take this or that drug for this or that disorder, and I would politely condescend. I would smile and tell them how sorry I felt, and then silently remind myself that they were living in a fantasy.
To me, people with mental illness were confused or weak, or worse:...
4 tags
Take This Project Mission Statement
“It’s dangerous to go alone.”
An acknowledgement that the world can be a difficult place for anyone.
“Take this.”
An offer of help.
Mental health is a hard thing to talk about. Depression and anxiety can be overwhelming, but so easily dismissed as “just feeling sad” or “needing to relax.” It’s far too easy to simply not talk about these problems; they sap your motivation and self-worth, making...
