Healthcare, particularly mental healthcare, remains out of reach for millions of uninsured Americans; and even those with healthcare access are only a job loss, rate hike, or Supreme Court decision away from losing it.

Even people with good insurance, or who live in a country with universal healthcare, are often reluctant to seek help for mental health issues. Privacy concerns and the enduring stigma associated with mental health treatment continue to act as deterrents and barriers.

So, people seek relief elsewhere; and for many gamers, video games offer the mental salve they need to keep pushing when life feels like it’s unbearable.

Video Games: Disease or Cure?

That video games could have therapeutic potential seems not only plausible but obvious.

Video games as self-care — or even therapy — may seem like a strange concept, especially from a non-gamer’s perspective. Indeed, most mainstream discussion around gaming treats it as something you’d use therapy to cure rather than a source of treatment itself.

From this point of view, video games are, at best, a waste of time — useless to the mind, devoid of educational value, and anything but therapeutic.

At worst, video games constitute an insidiously addictive and detrimental social plague that turns kids into either spaced-out zombies who resemble heroin addicts or maladjusted and angry shut-ins who express their rage by emptying an M-16 clip onto a crowd of strangers (à la Grand Theft Auto).

Indeed, according to mainstream society, video games are a scourge — and should be dealt with accordingly. Officials in the Indian state of Gujarat banned battle royale shooter Playerunknown’s Battlegrounds (PUBG) over concerns of addiction and violence. PUBG was also a casualty of China’s recent crackdown on gaming, spurred by similar concerns. And after every school shooting in the US, video games are inevitably scapegoated.

Public Enemy #1 [Credit: PUBG Corporation/Steam]

These are just a few examples of the tendency for governments and moral entrepreneurs to depict video games as a social illness to be quarantined or eliminated — quite literally now that the World Health Organization has added “gaming disorder” to its International Classification of Diseases and Related Health Problems (ICD-11).

But amongst gamers themselves, that video games could have therapeutic potential seems not only plausible but also obvious. Increasing numbers of us are turning to games during periods of stress and trauma. We understand, firsthand, the power our hobby has to heal and to bring relief.

Furthermore, gamer psychologists and therapists are effectively integrating video games into formal therapy, providing a glimpse of a future in which the mental health profession accepts — and even embraces — video game therapy as a legitimate form of intervention.

And while any game can be therapeutic — Stardew Valley and Fortnite (yes, THAT Fortnite) are two games that often pop up in this context — there are few, if any, games that can match Breath of the Wild’s therapeutic potential.

I know this is true because I have personally experienced its healing magic.

My Story

Breath of the Wild quite literally saved my mental health — and likely my life.

Like so many other players, I was immediately taken in by Breath of the Wild’s vast and open world, its awe-inspiring attention to detail, and its strategy-focused combat system. I’ve already written about that elsewhere and so I won’t re-hash it here.

I’ve also written about how, barely a month after Breath of the Wild launched, my daughter was born — and promptly rushed to the NICU for the first of two open-heart surgeries and a 90-day stay at the hospital.

Don’t worry! As you can see, she’s perfectly fine now.

It’s hard to impart to others just how grueling it is to see your child hospitalized. Unless you have experienced it with your own child, your imagination cannot do it justice. It is pure torture — there’s no other way to put it.

Those who’ve had loved ones hospitalized will tell you that the most maddening part of a hospital stay is the waiting. In between appointments and procedures, there are hours upon hours, days upon days, even weeks upon weeks of sitting around and waiting. And waiting some more. And waiting still even more. Time slows to a crawl.

It’s enough to lead your mind to wander to some very dark places.

Ok, maybe not THAT dark… [Credit: Nintendo/GIPHY]

There was one thing, however, that pulled me back from the brink of mental collapse many times over: Breath of the Wild.

On more occasions than I could count, I would turn on my Switch and, like Link looking into the Magic Mirror, transport myself to the world of Hyrule for a couple of hours. By the time I had turned the console off, all my worries had disappeared — at least temporarily. It was what I needed to carry on.

Switch on, tune in, switch out. I’d repeat this routine again and again as a way to psychologically survive until the next appointment or procedure. By keeping me sane, Breath of the Wild made it possible for me to maintain hope that someday soon my family and I would finally be able to go home.

That hope is what kept me going until one day, we finally did get to go home.

Breath of the Wild quite literally saved my mental health — and likely my life. I will be forever grateful to it.

And I’m not the only one who feels this way.