In a recent article "Technology and ACEs Prevention: How We Upgrade Our Vital Work", Gregory Sherrow brought our attention to the possibilities that computer technology, artificial intelligence and computer visualization could help people recover from childhood trauma.
There were many ideas proposed, some are fascinating while other are controversial and even disturbing. Personally, I never enjoyed video games. One of my friends have told me that there is a virtual community that uses all the communications that gamers employ for the purposes of peers support.
This may sound disturbing, however there are many lost souls who are trapped in the video game world already. If they have no immediate support groups in the area and this kind of service is the only viable option, then why not.
Violent video games are catharsis.
Formerly, I was a very big opponent of violent video games, yet in recent years I changed my opinion. Today there are many traumatized human beings that store a lot of anger. Historically, safe release of anger was a challenge: children would become street hooligans and shoot crows with slingshots or set trash cans on fire, adults would get into bar fights, engage in violent crime. There is a good reason why Yakutzi of Japan gave us Nintendo by investing their capitals into this new venture in the electronic world.
Before the invention of weapons of mass destruction, nations would go into war as the amount of opportunities declined in relationship to the population,consequently, the value of human life dropped, and anger accumulated. At those moments, nations would respond to the calls of their propagandists that would urge them into war.
Even martial arts pose a risk of injury. When some working class children were raised, this kind of training was not provided to them. Injury care costs money among other things and many parents simply found that keeping their children in front of a TV on a soft sofa is the safest way to raise them, making it the most common technological shortcut in child rearing since 1980s to this day.
However violent video games provide an opportunity for catharsis, for anger release in a relatively safe manner, without any physical damage to the outside world. Since anger is a beastly emotion that we can redirect towards abstract objects and unrelated people or creatures, video games can serve for the purposes of safe anger release. In case of hooligans that roamed the streets of yesterday and shot crows with slingshots, the crows that they killed were symbolic sacrificial animals. In case of violent video games, no such sacrifice takes place in the material world, set aside the consequences of prolonged sitting in front of a TV.
Are they responsible for all the gun violence of today?
All the shootings that we have today may be a result of confusion between thee video game reality and real life where a real tragedy can be created by the means of firearms. However they may also be the sign that the cup of iniquity is overfilled with anger and that video games simply cannot discharge all of it.
After all, the video game madness began thirty years ago and a generation of people grew up playing video games, while the increase in mass shootings was not as rapid for the first 25 years of their existance.
Maybe it is a little bit of both. However all the people that crammed themselves into this unhealthy world of virtual violence can benefit from the peer support mission that is established in the world of video games.
Video games as ways to train the brain for good vibes.
Several years ago, I read an article in some scientific magazine about a video game that was controlled by brain waves. A simple video game is hooked up to an EEG machine and serves as a feedback. Some airplane flies on the TV screen. It flies horizontally when a person is producing more beta waves, flies higher when more theta waves start to appear and flies towards the ground when beta waves begin to dominate, eventually crashing. Thus, this game encourages more meditative like states. I wonder what Dalai Lama would think about video games like that?
There is a number of closed-source EEG devices that are available on the market today. There is also an open source EEG community of enthusiasts that build EEG machines and write code to interpret the brain wave sequences.
I am not a geek so I would not able to make a good use of an unfinished open source project and would prefer a turn-key solution instead.
From the works of leading trauma psychologists like Doctor Bessel Van Der Kolk and Dr Clancy McKenzie, I learned about therapies such as Neurofeedback, Biofeedback, Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing, Cognitive Behavioral Therapy.
I conducted a web search and made some phone calls to find a practicing specialist in the area of Frederick MD that would take me in. My interest in those techniques is fueled by my desire to experience them myself before I could write about them. I wanted to know if they are a great technological tool to heal people from PTSD or an ineffective treatment that relies on placebo-like effects.
I found no specialist within my area of reach that could provide me with a required number of sessions in neurofeedback at an affordable cost.
I quickly realized why many of those specialists are reluctant to accept Medicaid. In the state of Maryland, all those therapies are billed using the same code as regular therapy. Medicaid covers a 45 minute therapy session, while sessions in Neurofeedback therapy may last up to two hours per patient. As I understand, the system does not make price adjustments for this difference in session length, thus discouraging practitioners from taking in Medicaid recipients.
Peer-Run Open Source ‘Feedback’ Therapy Club
I believe that there may be a great solution: a peer-run open source ‘feedback’ therapy club. What if a community of geeks, peers, people who want to help and to receive help were provided with an opportunity to take the matters into their own hands?
Participants could write software, analyze brain waves with their own algorithms, come up with techniques that combine the principles of more than one "feedback therapy" and experiment. With a little bit of funding, such community could map out the brain, conduct research and provide affordable services to people who need them the most.
At least one of the above mentioned computer-based techniques could be made into a fun brain-controlled video game and train the participant(s) to produce beneficial brain patterns, while minimizing the harmful ones.
This is another way to save money since it would eliminate the need for a therapist to conduct the session. Meanwhile I would still prefer to speak to a real psychotherapist instead of a robot.
With this approach we may save millions of dollars on institutionalized research and even have collective brainwave experiences that may aid us in the research of telepathy, synchronicity and for team building and training purposes.
I also believe that this approach can make computerized feedback therapies available to the poor medicaid recipients with PTSD, like myself.
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