Tetris and the Treatment of C-PTSD Flashbacks
/By Rikki Clos
With a number of my clients, we process the way that video games and roleplaying games can be used as coping mechanisms for stress, anxiety, and depression. It is also my firm belief that roleplaying games such as Dungeons & Dragons have clinical application because they offer opportunities to regain power and control over our story, even if our character is a half-orc paladin and we’re just people. The application of games is endless, which is why I found an article in Science Daily about use of Tetris to reduce Complex Post-traumatic Stress Disorder (C-PTSD) flashbacks to be very interesting.
In 2018, Kessler et al. studied the effects of playing the puzzle video game Tetris in reducing C-PTSD flashbacks. This was a small study done on twenty people currently in six to eight week long inpatient mental health stays, all of whom were diagnosed with C-PTSD and had identified flashbacks as a symptom. The researchers applied this intervention alongside normal group and individual therapy in an inpatient setting.
The researchers had participants write down a description of a traumatic memory they had flashbacks to on a piece of paper, and rip it up without discussing the material. Immediately afterward, participants would play Tetris for twenty-five minutes. For participants, targeted flashback contents decreased in the days and weeks following the intervention, but not for untargeted flashback contents. Overall, targeted flashback contents were reduced by 64 percent, with 16 of the 20 tested participants experiencing the effect.
The theorized mechanism of this intervention is that both visualization of stressful memories in great detail and playing Tetris activate the same visuospatial processing parts of the brain simultaneously, and cause interference with one another. Thus, when a client remembers a stressful memory in detail and the brain goes to store the memory again along the neural pathway, called a memory trace, the act of playing Tetris weakens the memory trace, making storing the memory more difficult, resulting in fewer flashbacks.
While this is fascinating findings and hypothesis, much further testing is necessitated before implementation in more vast clinical settings. Additionally, though the findings are encouraging, delving into work on trauma like C-PTSD is best done with professional guidance and supervision, so make sure to talk to your individual therapist before trying this on your own. If you don’t have a therapist yet, consider submitting an eligibility form to see one of our qualified psychotherapists at Umbrella Collective.
Nevertheless, this is encouraging research into the far-reaching capabilities of video games applied to the realm of psychotherapy and mental health.
