Quote from: Kyle AaronI wasn't very smart.

You were using AD&D1....what could possibly happen? "Empowered" was the best you could have hoped for. Now if you used RQ....

Regards,
David R

Quote from: jhkimSo while I'm sure there are pitfalls, I think James example disproves Jeff's generalization about use of RPGs being a "mind-fuck".  

I'd agree with you if James' example didn't have as his DM/player a trained, liscensed, accredited, and certified professional mental health expert using an RPG as a tool for counseling.

Which is different from someone without that mental health expertise using a role-playing game for self-therapy. Thus the mindfuck.

Quote from: jeff37923I'd agree with you if James' example didn't have as his DM/player a trained, liscensed, accredited, and certified professional mental health expert using an RPG as a tool for counseling.

Which is different from someone without that mental health expertise using a role-playing game for self-therapy. Thus the mindfuck.

Well, that wasn't the claim you stated.  You never said the RPGs were appropriate for use by professionals -- just that any use would be a mind-fuck.  I'll take it that's what you meant.  

(As a personal note on this, you make a big deal out of accredited professionals.  In my own life, I usually prefer to talk to friends or family about my problems, rather than treating them as unqualified and instead seeking a professional.  That may explain some difference in point of view.)  

That said, a question for James -- was there anything particularly unusual about the D&D games with your therapist?  In particular, was there anything done in them that you'd consider dangerous to do with your friends?  It didn't sound like it from my reading, but maybe I'm missing something.

Quote from: jhkimWell, that wasn't the claim you stated.  You never said the RPGs were appropriate for use by professionals -- just that any use would be a mind-fuck.  I'll take it that's what you meant.  

This is of life or death importance to you, isn't it?

Quote from: jhkim(As a personal note on this, you make a big deal out of accredited professionals.  In my own life, I usually prefer to talk to friends or family about my problems, rather than treating them as unqualified and instead seeking a professional.  That may explain some difference in point of view.)  

There's a big difference between talking to someone about your problems and getting treatment for a diagnosed mental health issue.

Quote from: jhkimThat said, a question for James -- was there anything particularly unusual about the D&D games with your therapist?  In particular, was there anything done in them that you'd consider dangerous to do with your friends?  It didn't sound like it from my reading, but maybe I'm missing something.

Not that I noticed at the time. We just gamed. I ran her through a few rooms of a dungeon and she did the same for me, but with different rooms. There was fighting and talking, but none of it seemed psychologically directed. No "there's an ogre whose beard style matches your dad's" or anything.

James's and Mr. Funks posts basically sum up my feelings on this. Fun is a great source of therapy and RPGs are a good source of escapist fun. But that's the clincher - escapist.

Quote from: jhkimOK, so in Educational Roleplaying thread, some people were bringing up the idea of role-playing as psychological therapy.  That seems like unrelated baggage to the topic of education, so I'm making a separate thread on it.  

It seems to me that a lot of what people are objecting to as "mixing" of psychological role-playing and casual role-playing is really a problem with therapy itself.  i.e. It's not like role-playing skull-fucking the corpse of a cabin-boy would seem any better if it were done by a professional psychiatrist as therapy.  It would still seem fucked up to me.  

Maybe my bias against therapists is showing here.

It would still be fucked up, but I doubt that any real therapist would ever do the skull-fucking thing.

The idea that anything therapeutic is going on in those games where people do the most evil, warped, degenerate crap they can think of is, I think, just a kind of lame justification for the games.

I'm not saying you couldn't find a therapist of some kind, somewhere, who would say otherwise (there's *all* kinds of people who do therapy including some who are pretty fucked up), but any kind of mainstream therapy would probably find those kinds of games pretty degenerate and the idea that there's some psychological value to playing them risible (I'm not a therapist, but this is my not-entirely-uninformed guess).

In fact, I think there's very little actual intersection between roleplaying games and roleplaying as a therapeutic technique despite the use of the same word. Roleplaying in therapy and education is usually much more controlled / guided and much more scoped than roleplaying in RPGs.

That's not to say some of the skill-sets don't intersect; in work-place communication training the ability to "play a role" of a coworker in a specific situation makes you a useful participant. In therapeutic roleplaying being able to emote (like an actor does) is handy... but these are minor side-points.

The one example we have of roleplaying being used by an actual therapist seems to be more of a "getting-to-know-you" and "let's-see-you-interact" kind of exercise than anything related specifically to RPGs, themselves, yeah?

Does anyone know of any other instance where a real therapist used an RPG in a therapeutic situation?

Cheers,
-E.

For awhile, I was in a Dark Ages Vampire game off and on. And one of the guys in the group was in seeing a therapist/counselor/whatever. And he told her about the game and she recommended that he continue to do it. For a lot of the same reasons mentioned here: escapism, empowerment, etc.

He was a short guy, single father, never got to finish college, has self-esteem issues and was pretty stressed most of the time.

His character, OTOH, was the opposite. He was a large, beast of a man, with supreme confidence and arrogance. And while we (the other players) were busying trying to improve our status in the political climate, his character centered mostly on improving himself (studying, learning new disciplines). He absolutely LOVED the game.

And I think it did a lot for him. To be able to this, essentially in fantasy-land, gave him a little more self-confidence. And he could be someone ELSE.

Did any of the rest of us have any education in psych? Hell no.