Mental health is tricky, isn’t it ?

It’s not like cutting your finger and putting a bandage on it to make it stop, because when stuff happens it is invisible to everyone. I guess that makes it hard for everyone involved to know how to handle it .. never mind ‘fixing’ it.
Heck … even ‘fixing’ is tricky, because one persons’ mental health issue is another persons’ quirk.

It certainly helps when famous people talk about issues like Wil Wheaton (yep, that one) does :

panic attacks suck

Tabletop games tend to make everything a bit too abstract and ‘gamey’ (sp?).
It is too easy to treat any such issues as a mere bonus/penalty to your character.

Videogames do have the potential to be more immersive, but they too require the developers to treat the subject with extreme care and respect.
I think the best example I’ve seen so far has been “Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice”.  ( wiki https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hellblade%3A_Senua's_Sacrifice )
The main character in this game is clearly suffering from some form of psychosis.
There are voices in her head telling you things (almost always negative …) and there’s stuff in the ‘game world’ that may or may not be an illusion.
I must admit that all of this sounded like some kind of fantasy and the usual marketing nonsense … until a few people in the review section on Gog.com more or less confirmed that …yes … this is what it can be like.

It’s always one thing for developers/publishers to talk about how they ‘respect’ something.
It’s something completely different when it is confirmed to be eerily close to what actual people experience.
Without that bit of ‘real world’ background the game was great, but that definitely made it one of the best I’ve played since ‘this war of mine’ (another game worthy of the ‘mature content’ rating).

We definitely need every bit that makes the subject of ‘mental health’ to be a lot less of a taboo for everyone.