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According to destructoid
50,000 units sold on Microsoft format
This month saw the release of the BAFTA award-winning Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice on Xbox One. After shifting over 50,000 units in first few weeks, developers Ninja Theory are to donate thousands of dollars to the Mental Health America organisation.
The sombre adventure title, which launched last year on PS4 and PC, stars a young warrior woman who embarks on a nightmarish journey to save the soul of her lover, battle otherworldly monstrosities and the crippling anguish within her own mind, a psychosis which she believes to be a curse. The game was lauded for its sensitive treatment of mental illness, attained through the developers working alongside neurosurgeons and those who are affected themselves.
This isn’t the first time Ninja Theory have donated money from Hellblade sales to mental health charities. On World Mental Health Day 2017, the proceeds from all sales of the game within a 24-hour period were given to UK charity Rethink; an organisation I myself have required the aid of many times. Ninja Theory have stated that although they didn’t reach their intended goal of 100,000 units, they will donate a further $50K whenever they hit that milestone.
I said it then, and I’ll repeat myself now; I sincerely hope that any members of our beloved community, who are affected by such issues, be it they themselves, or their loved ones, can find comfort, support and relief through friends, family, colleagues, forums and healthcare professionals. You are not alone in this, nor do you ever have to be, I promise you.
Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice is available now on PS4, Xbox One and PC.
Although we didn't reach our stretch goal of 100K units to donate $50K, we have decided to still donate the full $50K when we do hit 100K sales! pic.twitter.com/fPts8WukAs
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This article and images were originally posted on [destructoid] April 21, 2018 at 11:05AM. Credit to Author and destructoid | ESIST.T>G>S Recommended Articles Of The Day
Scientists have discovered that being an only child doesn’t just lead to behavioural differences that can set kids apart from those with siblings – it actually affects a child’s brain development, too.
A new study comparing brain scans of only children and others who grew up with siblings has revealed significant differences in the participants’ grey matter volume, and researchers say it’s the first neurological evidence in this area linking changes in brain structure to differing behaviours.
To investigate if only children demonstrated neurological differences from their peers who grew up with brothers and sisters, researchers at Southwest University in China recruited 303 college-age students.
The mix of young people in China offers a broad pool of candidates for this area of research, owing to the nation’s long-lasting one-child policy, which limited many but not all families to only raising a single child in between 1979 and 2015.
The common stereotype about being an only child is that growing up without siblings influences an individual’s behaviour and personality traits, making them more selfish and less likely to share with their peers.
Previous research has borne some of this conventional wisdom out – but also demonstrated that only children can receive cognitive benefits as a result of their solo upbringing.
The participants in this latest study were approximately half only children (and half children with siblings), and were given cognitive tests designed to measure their intelligence, creativity, and personality, in addition to scanning their brains with MRI machines.
Although the results didn’t demonstrate any difference in terms of intelligence between the two groups, they did reveal that only children exhibited greater flexibility in their thinking – a key marker of creativity per the Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking.
While only children showed greater flexibility, they also demonstrated less agreeableness in personality tests under what’s called the Revised NEO Personality Inventory. Agreeableness is one of the five chief measures tested under the system, with the other four being extraversion, conscientiousness, neuroticism, and openness to experience.
But more importantly than the behavioural data – which have been the focus of many other studies – the MRI results actually demonstrated neurological differences in the participants’ grey matter volume (GMV) as a result of their upbringing.
In particular, the results showed that only children showed greater supramarginal gyrus volumes – a portion of the parietal lobe thought to be associated with language perception and processing, and which in the study correlated to the only children’s greater flexibility.
By contrast, the brains of only children revealed less volume in other areas, including the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) – associated with emotional regulation, such as personality and social behaviours – which the team found to be correlated with their lower scores on agreeableness.
While the researchers aren’t drawing firm conclusions on why only children exhibit these differences, they suggest it’s possible that parents may foster greater creativity in only children by devoting more time to them – and possibly placing greater expectations on them.
Meanwhile, they hypothesise that only children’s lesser agreeableness could result from excessive attention from family members, less exposure to external social groups, and more focus on solitary activities while growing up.
It’s important to note that there are some limitations to the study – first off, all the participants were highly educated young people taken from a specific part of the world, and the results only reflect testing from one point in time.
That said, the researchers say it’s the first evidence that differences in the anatomical structures of the brain are linked to differing behaviour in terms of flexibility and agreeableness.
“Additionally, our results contribute to the understanding of the neuroanatomical basis of the differences in cognitive function and personality between only-children and non-only-children,” the authors write in their study.
While there’s still a lot we don’t understand about what’s going on here, it’s clear that there’s a link between our family environments and the way our brain structure develops, and it’ll be fascinating to see where this direction of research takes us in the future.
A review of worldwide studies has found that add-on treatment with high-dose b-vitamins – including B6, B8 and B12 – can significantly reduce symptoms of schizophrenia more than standard treatments alone.
The research – on the effect of vitamin and mineral supplements on symptoms of schizophrenia – is funded by The Medical Research Council and University of Manchester, and is published in Psychological Medicine, one of the world’s leading psychology journals
Lead author Joseph Firth, based at the University’s Division of Psychology and Mental Health, said: “Looking at all of the data from clinical trials of vitamin and mineral supplements for schizophrenia to date, we can see that B vitamins effectively improve outcomes for some patients.
“This could be an important advance, given that new treatments for this condition are so desperately needed.”
Schizophrenia affects around 1% of the population and is among the most disabling and costly long term conditions worldwide.
Currently, treatment is based around the administration of antipsychotic drugs.
Although patients typically experience remission of symptoms such as hallucinations and delusions within the first few months of treatment, long-term outcomes are poor; 80% of patients relapse within five years.
The researchers reviewed all randomized clinical trials reporting effects of vitamin or mineral supplements on psychiatric symptoms in people with schizophrenia.
In what is the first meta-analysis carried out on this topic, they identified 18 clinical trials with a combined total of 832 patients receiving antipsychotic treatment for schizophrenia.
B-vitamin interventions which used higher dosages or combined several vitamins were consistently effective for reducing psychiatric symptoms, whereas those which used lower doses were ineffective.
Also, the available evidence also suggests that B-vitamin supplements may be most beneficial when implemented early on, as b-vitamins were most likely to reduce symptoms when used in studies of patients with shorter illness durations.
Firth added: “High-dose B-vitamins may be useful for reducing residual symptoms in people with schizophrenia, although there were significant differences among the findings of the studies we looked at.”
“There is also some indication that these overall effects may be driven by larger benefits among subgroups of patients who have relevant genetic or dietary nutritional deficiencies.”
Co-author Jerome Sarris, Professor of Integrative Mental Health at Western Sydney University, added: “This builds on existing evidence of other food-derived supplements, such as certain amino-acids, been beneficial for people with schizophrenia.
“These new findings also fit with our latest research examining how multi-nutrient treatments can reduce depression and other disorders.”
The research team say more studies are now needed to discover how nutrients act on the brain to improve mental health, and to measure effects of nutrient-based treatments on other outcomes such as brain functioning and metabolic health.
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Here’s a truism for you: dementia is a god-awful thing. A savage and remorseless condition, it strips away a lifetime of accumulated experience and personality, eradicating memory and emotional attachment, sometimes seeming to erase a person entirely. It’s a heart-rending process to witness, watching somebody vanish by degrees in this way, seeing them become angry, depressed or violent, and losing all recognition for the people they’ve loved for their entire lives.
Sometimes, the decay can be kinder than expected – patients may drift into a kind of happy reverie, a sort of peace descending as their ember fades. Often it does not happen like this. In many cases, someone who has begun to exhibit the early signs of dementia will be aware of what’s happening, the unavoidable degradation made all the more bitter by the diminishing moments of clarity which pass fleetingly across the lens of their consciousness. Agonisingly for those around them, it can be supremely difficult not to will on the acceleration of the process, or indeed the final embrace of death, in a desire to see the tragedy of this recognition extinguished for good. There is scant comfort in knowing that the final stages of erasure leave little room for self-reflection.
And yet, for every guilt-saturated second in which you may wish for the release of a friend or relative from this inexorable grasp, you can be stung a thousand times by the merest hint of recognition in their eyes – a tiny smile, a grateful squeeze of the hand. The darkest curse of dementia can be the fragments of the person it leaves behind.
Of course, this conjecture comes from the selfish perspective of the witness. I speak with a little experience: both my father and grandmother were ravaged by dementia in the final stages of their lives. As a result, I know that it’s difficult enough to be involved in the process, even at considerable remove, that it becomes easier to grieve in advance. To begin, quite frankly, to think of them as dead already.
Then, someone you thought had vanished resurfaces, gasping, for even the briefest moment. In the last days of her life, I visited my grandmother in hospital and talked with her about things which had happened – 30 years ago in my childhood and 80 years ago in her’s – in astonishing detail: memories of happy days spent in sunshine and light. She was frail and faltering, but she had clarity and emotional continuity. A woman I hadn’t seen for years was there once more. She never left that bed, and did not go gently, and I have never really forgiven myself for all the conversations I didn’t have in the months and years prior, the encounters rushed through, the moments wasted.
Years later, when my semi-estranged father passed, I wasn’t lucky enough to have another chance. Never tremendously close, we had precious few shared memories to revisit and he’d lost all recognition of me well before his final days, but I know there were things which eased his passing – happy recollections of his own. Even when he began to exhibit signs of unpredictability which sometimes escalated to violence, there were bits of his old self in between.
The point is this. Dementia can present us with a locked door, a sullen slab of unresponsiveness. It’s exhausting, harrowing, alienating. It’s only going to become more common, but there is hope. Pharmaceutical trials are showing some results in the amelioration of its onset. Mental health practices and dietary advances are leading to fitter, healthier brains more resilient to its advances. And VR may have its part to play as well.
It comes from Alex Smale at TribeMix, primarily a social media marketing company. Smale himself has a rich games industry background, beginning his career job at NMS Software, developers of pinball sim Tilt.
After a few years of moving around “in search of ever higher pay cheques”, Smale eventually found himself working with at Bitmap Brothers as head of art, where he rounded out a decade in games. Since, he’s spent a stint running a pub (“brilliant fun, quite dangerous and always interesting”), and set up a photography business just as Facebook began to take hold, getting an early grasp of the potential of the medium for promotion. After an even wilder turn working as the head of marketing in a zoo, Smale set up his current business.
“Our friends, Stan and Dulcie, are 99 and 94 years old respectively. Over the past two years, we watched them go from active people walking into town to do their shopping, to losing their confidence and never leaving the house.
“I eventually decided to set up a social media marketing agency, Tribemix, to help other businesses use social to grow. That’s been going really, really well. I’ve had one eye on VR since the announcement of the Oculus Rift. I knew that social media and VR would converge, and brands would need to create engaging experiences on this new platform. So I’ve gone back to my roots and we’ve been working on developing branded social VR experiences for our clients.
“We had some elderly neighbours who hadn’t left the house for a long time due to disability. We’d taken them back to some of their favourite holiday destinations using Street View and an iPad already, and I thought, ‘wouldn’t it be great if we could take them on holiday again using VR?’ So I created a basic beach scene to run on the Rift for them to try.”
The experiment was a successful one, and Smale realised the potential of the technology to offer hope.
“I had a friend who worked in care homes, and I asked him to introduce me to one so I could try what we’d made on some other elderly people. He put us in touch with the amazing folk at Belmont View in Hertford, which specialises in dementia care and is run by the Quantum group. They were really open minded to the idea and really supportive. Before this, I didn’t have a clue about dementia, but we’ve learned a lot.
“We worked with them for over a year, developing and fine-tuning a range of experiences specifically designed to help people living with dementia. The carers, managers and residents have all given us invaluable feedback which has enabled us to create something really unique and effective. The change in the residents’ behaviour is stark, as you can see from the video.
“You can’t just put an Oculus Rift on an elderly person’s head and walk away. There’s a carefully developed process we’ve created that ensures the wellbeing of the patient at all times and ensures a positive experience for all”
The sort of experiences which Tribemix has been developing are very much at the gentle end of VR, for obvious reasons. They’re relaxing environments rather than games, but Tribemix doesn’t use 360 degree video or photography of real-world locations, instead preferring the environmental control offered by 3D modelling.
ARTICLE CONTINUES BELOW
“This is all realtime 3D,” Smale clarifies. “Yes, there’s a trade-off in realism. But the control we have in 3D environment is a world apart from what we can set up to film around a 360 camera rig. And it’s this control that makes all the difference. People living with dementia are often incredibly sensitive, so being able to control simple things such as the distance birds are from the camera, or position of the audio is vital.
“And because of this sensitivity, you can’t just put an Oculus Rift on an elderly person’s head and walk away. There’s a carefully developed process we’ve created that ensures the wellbeing of the patient at all times and ensures a positive experience for all. It’s important to understand, this isn’t for everyone. And even for those people who do like it, they don’t necessarily always like it. So it’s always important to ensure that the experience is carried out on a voluntary basis and never pressured or forced.”
Smale raises a good point. It can be incredibly difficult to understand exactly what a dementia patient wants, and even harder to predict how they may react to a sudden or unexpected change in environment. Smale says that not only does the experience tend to relax people, it also offers a longer-term respite from some of the emotional peaks and troughs so common with the condition and assures me that the assessment processes are based on science and the concrete experience of healthcare professionals.
“That video is just the tip of the iceberg. It only shows a few brief minutes from a small number of patients who were kind enough to let us film them and show our work to the world. We’re really grateful to them for letting us do that, as it has opened a great many doors for us.
“But what you don’t get from the video are the long periods of serenity that the patients enjoy. It’s really relaxing just watching them use it. You often wonder if they’ve fallen asleep behind the headset. But then they’ll whisper something about the scene they’re in, and you know they’re still awake. Just very, very relaxed.
“People living with dementia are often confused and distressed. Rather than trying to bring them back to what we consider to be reality, it is better to live with them in the reality that they are in. A virtual experience is a way of taking them to a nice place from wherever they feel they currently are in a way that is actually far less stressful than taking them there in reality. For many, leaving the comfort of a care home and getting on a bus to travel somewhere is just not possible. Our virtual reality experiences allow those who haven’t been able to leave the care homes to enjoy a day out. With our robust processes, we ensure that if at any point, there is a risk of distress, we end the experience immediately and bring the patient straight back to well-being. Something that has always been very important to us to maintain.
“The dementia experts at Quantum have developed a wellbeing assessment tool based on the Abbey Pain scale. This records the wellbeing and behaviour of the patients before, during and after their VR experience. It’s really useful data that clearly shows a positive benefit across the board. We’re now working with two NHS hospitals on a behavioural research study which will expand on this work. It will also demonstrate the effectiveness in an acute setting.
“People living with dementia are often confused and distressed. Rather than trying to bring them back to what we consider to be reality, it is better to live with them in the reality that they are in”
One of the key challenges facing dementia research is that the condition is often not treated until well established. Often it will go unnoticed, and many patients express understandable reticence to bring it to light, fearing stigma attached to it, not wanting to cause concern or present a burden. Stimulation and emotional engagement are increasingly considered to be effective methods of strengthening the brain against dementia, so I ask Smale if his work has potential in preventative care, or whether it might actually slow the onset of an established condition.
“This has yet to be determined,” he admits. “We’re hopeful that our research studies will begin to demonstrate some really useful outcomes, such as reduced medication or improvements in appetite. We have already seen countless memories brought vividly back to life in the patients. Sometimes patients will come out of the experiences and recount childhood memories linked to the experiences for half an hour or more. It’s magical to watch.”
It’s important to note that Tribemix is a for-profit company, not a charity. Whilst he may have noble goals, Smale also has his own bills to pay, and VR is an expensive business. Nonetheless, this isn’t an exploitative venture.
“The care providers will be the ones who have to cover the costs of the systems,” he says. “We’ve tried very hard to keep this as low as possible and we’re at a price point that works well for the industry and allows care providers to have access to the systems 24-7. Hardware is our biggest hurdle to get over. Oculus have been really helpful for VR hardware, but we also need help with the PCs to run it. So we would love to speak to any laptop manufacturers who might be interested in sponsoring our project. It’s getting a huge amount of interest worldwide. We’re also keen to make any connections in the care world.
“The more places we can get the systems in to, the more people we can help.”
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Pokémon Go seems to be rolling off everyone’s Lickitung, and there’s a good reason — the Android and iOS app has only been out for a week but it’s already improving people’s mental health.
If you scour the many #PokémonGO-related tweets on Twitter, you’ll find that many people are posting about how the augmented reality game is helping their mental health, mood, social anxiety, and depression. The app uses your smartphone’s GPS and encourages players, or “trainers,” to go outside and interact with various local landmarks to interact with them as Pokéstops and Gyms in the game. You can catch various Pokémon just about anywhere, and there’s a tracker that notes which specific ones are nearby.
But apart from helping people be more active, the game is also bringing more people together. Dr. John Grohol, founder of the mental health network Psych Central, says while the developers behind Pokémon Go didn’t “mean to create a mental healthgaming app,” they’ve effectively done so.
“I think this is a wonderful demonstration of the unintentional but beneficial consequences of gaming and producing a game that encourages healthy exercise,” Grohol, an expert on online behavior and mental health, writes in a blog post. “Hundreds of app developers have tried to develop mood-altering apps by encouraging people to track their mood or providing them with encouraging affirmations. But these apps rarely catch on, and few people continue using them past the first week.”
A lot of this analysis is going off what people are saying on Twitter, but research has been saying for a while that exercise and going outside can improve people’s mood. Motivating someone to do those things has been hard, but Pokémon Go has managed to succeed thanks to the long-running success of pocket monsters.
“Granted, it’s through their smartphone acting as an interface, but walking is walking, even if the motivation for doing so is to play a game,”Grohol writes. “For a person suffering from depression or another mood disorder, the idea of exercise can be nearly impossible to contemplate, much less do. For someone suffering from social anxiety, the idea of going outside and possibly bumping into others who may want to talk to you is daunting.”
You’ve probably seen more about Pokémon online than you ever thought you would. Perhaps you’ve even downloaded the PokeGone Chrome extension to block all Pokémon-related content from the web. If that’s the case, you won’t see this article, but for the rest of you that haven’t tried the game yet — it may be worth a try if you are looking for an alternative to improving your mental health. Of course, it’s not the solution to treating depression or anxiety, but it could help.