While gaming is not a cure for depression, it helped me to grow into a more social person, to form connections with people more easily, and helped me to feel less isolated.
During the covid-19 pandemic in 2020, the lack of social interactions tied together with the fear and anxiety driven by fake news and conspiracies around vaccines in the media, caused my mental health to plummet.
It was my first year of university and before I had had a chance to form connections on campus, we were thrown into a state of disaster and the country was placed on lockdown. I spent weeks feeling sorry for myself, not knowing how to entertain myself nor who to speak to besides my family who I had been locked in the house with for over three months. Eventually I turned on my PlayStation console for solace.
While there was access to mental health services during the pandemic, many people had physical and mental restrictions that prevented them from seeking help. A democracy survey conducted by the Human Sciences Research Council and the University of Johannesburg’s Centre for Social Change and Development revealed that in 2020, an estimated 33% of South Africans were depressed, 45% were fearful of catching the virus and 29% were feeling isolated and lonely. The survey consisted of 19 330 participants of different races and backgrounds, with the majority aged 25 to 59.
I shared the sentiments expressed in the survey. That is why I turned to gaming to connect and create a reality that was less depressing than the one I found myself in.
Gaming was my way of coping with the lack of human interaction and fewer entertainment activities brought on by the nationwide lockdown. In June 2021, Forbes Technology Council reported an increase of 200% in people aged over 60 searching for games, joining the 93% of teens who game regularly, according to research data provided by G2A.com – the world’s biggest digital marketplace for gamers.
These statistics show that people globally turned to gaming during the pandemic because of the need to find alternative ways to connect and communicate with others amidst lockdown measures. I also wanted to alleviate my newfound depression brought on by harsh lockdown measures.
I started playing a multiplayer, online game called Call of Duty where I met a group of people that I consider close friends to this day. We began entering e-sports competitions where we could compete in online tournaments for cash rewards. We would do this by signing up on sites such as the African Cyber Gaming League and VS Gaming where you can connect with other people who enjoy the same game as you, and became part of a large community of people from diverse backgrounds and walks of life.
Gaming has helped me overcome social anxiety by allowing me to socialise in virtual chatrooms with people from all over the world, where I have learnt better communication skills and have been able to find people I relate to more. I always struggled to find something I was passionate about as I was not very good at schoolwork and failed dismally at sport. Finding games helped me discover my true passion for e-sports and unlocked a whole new world for me.
There are, however, studies that have found negative aspects to gaming. The Harvard Medical School reported that gaming can be associated with serious health risks such as sleep deprivation, insomnia, depression, aggression and anxiety. The report also stated that gaming can lead to a “gaming addiction”, resulting in loss of interest in activities and crucial relationships with peers, and can lead to obesity due to increased food intake while gaming. These are real issues that gamers do face, however, a general population sample report from the American Journal of Psychiatry shows that only an estimated 0.1-1% of people suffer from gaming addiction.
An American Counselling Association report also found that gaming could have negative mental health consequences including: negative coping mechanisms, unhealthy lifestyles, loneliness, isolation and depression. However, in my experience, gaming has had quite the opposite effect.
Gaming in moderation is key for absorbing the positive effects such as setting specific times to game and making sure to seek professional help when needed. To avoid the negatives associated with gaming, the Harvard Medical School suggests limiting screen time and engaging in healthy activities such as exercise or socialising physically.
Anxiety and depression are major issues the world faces today, especially after the pandemic as it has altered and changed the lives of almost everyone. Gaming is a great way to alleviate some of the strain caused by these serious mental illnesses. There are many different genres of games, so I truly believe there is a game out there for everyone to play and form connections in.
For a student journalist, social media can be beneficial if used properly, but it is very easy to cross the line to addiction.
Social media has always been something that puts me at ease after a long and stressful day, but I never imagined that I would become addicted.
The Addiction Center website defines social media addiction as “a behavioural addiction that is defined by being overly concerned about social media, driven by an uncontrollable urge to log on to or use social media, and devoting so much time and effort to social media that it impairs other important life areas”.
It all started with me moving away from home in Eshowe, KwaZulu-Natal, in February to study at Wits. The next thing I knew, I was spending a lot of time on my phone to escape the reality of missing home and my family, especially my twin sister. I shy away from interacting with people, though I am capable of conversing with anyone. I would be on my phone swinging among Instagram, Twitter and TikTok.
At first, I told myself that what could be better for a student journalist than to be on the lookout for goings on around the world without stepping outside my room and talking to people about current affairs, gossip and entertainment? However, I started to notice that I could not ignore a notification tone, and that anything that hindered me from attending to my phone agitated me. Whether I was in the middle of drafting an essay or studying, I could not help but check my social media pages, especially TikTok.
I tried to limit my screen time to no more than an hour each day, but I consistently came up short. Then I checked my screen time management on my phone settings and discovered that I typically spent close to 20 hours per week, just on TikTok!
An article by Tanyaradzwa Pamhirwa referred to a 2022 South African Depression and Anxiety Group survey that found that more than 60% of South Africans reported being addicted to social media, and that social media addiction is most common among young people, with 80% of respondents aged 18 to 24 reporting addiction.
I had always justified my social media usage that it was a distraction from missing my family and that I was not committing any crime by doing what other people my age were doing. So, I would constantly send TikTok videos and Instagram reels to my sister, until one day she called me and said, “You are always online, even during the day!” This is when I realised that I might be addicted to social media because my sister would not be concerned otherwise.
According to the Addiction Centre website, social media is “addictive both physically and psychologically” and self-expression on social media platforms activates the same area of the brain as using an addictive substance.
This addiction had taken a toll on my wellbeing. I was not as physically active as I used to be. Instead, I lay in bed all the time. My sleeping patterns were irregular because it was impossible to resist the urge to check social media before bed and waking up for school every day would be a drag. I neglected my personal life, resulting in loneliness and anxiety.
My optometrist back home had told me last year that, “You are short-sighted my friend,” after he had tested my vision. My vision has gotten even worse since I started spending a lot of time on social media. I experience eye pain, watery eyes and severe headaches.
The University of Pittsburgh Medical Centre says “Spending too many hours staring at a screen can cause eye strain. You tend to blink less while staring at the blue light from a screen, and the movement of the screen makes your eyes work harder to focus.”
After my sister’s call, I made the decision to spend less time on social media, especially in the newsroom, and to pay attention and interact with my classmates. I now have a good relationship with everyone in class, and I only use my phone during break times. Talking to my family every day helps me miss them less.
Acknowledging an addiction is not easy, but it is the first and most significant step towards getting help. I have been doing research online, reading articles and taking online surveys on what to do to minimise the time I spend on my phone scrolling, double tapping and screenshotting memes.
I am willing to take those baby steps towards battling my addiction and fighting it until I feel free and comfortable without or with less reliance on social media.
After discovering the root of my depression and anxiety, it became clear why stress is referred to as “the silent killer”.
At only 20 years old, I found myself sitting on my bed with a handful of pills ready to take my own life. I was tired of how I was feeling, and I wanted it to end.
Two years earlier, in 2016, I had taken a gap year after I did not get accepted into any university I had applied to. I was embarrassed because in my community there is a stigma attached to taking a gap year.
I was constantly being asked: “What are you doing with your life now?” and “Doing nothing this year will make you lazy.” While at a funeral, grieving, someone said, “Your brother didn’t take a gap year, so why are you?”
This constant comparisons to my brother who went to university straight out of school hit me hard. So did seeing my peers move forward while I felt stagnant, and constantly feeling as if I was disappointing my parents. I started doing admin work at our church office and applied again. I eventually got accepted in 2017 for a higher certificate in journalism.
I could have gone on to work as a journalist, but my plan was always to get an undergraduate degree first. When I received a rejection letter from UCT, I remember feeling embarrassed and like a failure again. Fortunately, I was admitted for an undergraduate degree in copywriting at Vega.
Within the first two weeks I knew the course was not for me, but I decided to complete the year and switch to a different university or degree programme the following year. As time went on, I found myself feeling sad and angry all the time and going to class made me feel so anxious, I would cry every day.
My breaking point came the day I received my mark for an assignment that I had worked on day and night – 37%. After that soul-crushing moment, I left campus early without telling anyone, and stopped at two different pharmacies to get as many pills as I could.
As I sat on my bed later, the stress of dropping out was too much. So was the stress of continuing with the programme. I was ready to end my life. At that very moment, a friend messaged me: “Are you okay?” I am alive today because of that message.
Since then, there have been a few more instances when I have felt the only way out was to take my own life. In 2022 I started seeing a psychologist and psychiatrist. What came out of these sessions was not only an ADHD diagnosis, but the fact that I have clinical depression and general anxiety disorder.
The root cause of my mental illnesses was revealed as stress. In the sessions with my therapist, we found a pattern. Whenever life became what felt like unbearably stressful, I would reach such a low that I would only see suicide as the only way out. This discovery is what saved me.
The constant stress I had been under since 2016 had taken its toll on me mentally. I realised that I had suppressed my emotions because life was stressful for everyone, and I thought not being able to handle the pressure would make me seem weak.
Looking back, there are many things I would do differently. I would pay attention to the feelings of hopelessness and the lows that were not just a bad day but would stay constantly with me.
A clinical professor at Brown University, Carol Landau says that the impact of stress on depression is “one of the most important problems of our time”. I would like to echo her sentiments and add that it is one that we should treat with the seriousness it requires.
Imagining a future when South Africans are part of creating global technologies that take on board local contexts.
In 2017 I took a course called Utopian Studies offered by the department of political studies at Wits University. Utopian Studies allows us to construct a coherent imagined future, and to consider all philosophical, ethical and theoretical possibilities, to determine an ideal towards which we can strive because when we do not have a collectively imagined ideal, it becomes harder to know what we are working towards.
This made me think about what an ideal South African state should be. Should it be one where everyone is happy, or one where everyone has money?
At the time that I did this course, the university was coming into a self-awareness of the way that institutions have a culture that is historically white, and was seeking ways to transform itself into a space that was accessible to all the people in it.
So, in this context, the coordinator of my Utopian Studies course, Julian Brown, began to deconstruct the ways in which media genres that offered projections of humanity in the future (mostly sci-fi films and books) were often predicting “a vision of a [white] future where assimilation, not diversity, is the goal”.
It speaks to the extent to which a diversity of voices and ideas exist within the spaces where the media content is produced.
This provides a lens to understand the need for a diversity of voices where artificial intelligence (AI, the programming of machines to mimic human intelligence) development is concerned, to place a diversity of developers in the spaces where AI is trained. Because we run the risk of recreating much of the socio-political dynamics we have today, in our more technologically advanced future. Unlike with search engines and social media platforms, AI requires us to develop the technologies that make a South African AI possible.
In November 2022, OpenAI, a US technology research lab, launched ChatGPT, an AI computer programme that can interact in a chat-based conversation with humans. The programme is trained on data from across the internet and is able to mimic human cognitive processes in its conversational responses to a prompt.
This means that unlike regular search engines such as Google, ChatGPT uses deep learning techniques to build context and give more in-depth answers in a way that a human would. This is an incredible developmental milestone for AI technology considering that until now, most AI programmes could do little more than just following an instruction.
Now, because AI technology is dependent on being pre-trained by human beings, it makes sense that it possesses, to a certain degree, subjective, biased and sometimes even prejudiced data.
For this reason, the arrival of AI technology as advanced as ChatGPT creates a serious impetus for South Africa to invest more intentionally in the development of our own AI technology. Not necessarily to compete with OpenAI, but because we know that the knowledge and information generated by foreign AI may not be sensitive to our cultural contexts and may continue to perpetuate a false sense of cultural and moral universality that makes us the ‘other’.
The AI Institute of South Africa (AIISA) launched an AI hub at the Tshwane University of Technology in Pretoria on March 24, 2023, in collaboration with the University of Johannesburg. Reporting on their website, the two institutions promised that through their hubs, they would “generate knowledge and applications that will position South Africa as a competitive player in the global AI space”.
The hubs provide us with an opportunity to create futures of our own imagination. This has the potential to create global technologies that take into consideration local and contextual issues.
FEATURED IMAGE: Morongoa Masebe, Wits Vuvuzela student journalist. Photo: File
Reading enables me to escape the confusing and confining circumstances of my own world through gaining a deeper understanding of others.
Literature has always been my escape from everyday life, and when I do face real people, it is also the reason that I resist judging a book by its cover, so to speak.
When life becomes hard for me, such as in 2020 when the covid-19 pandemic trapped me within the walls of my house and I experienced grief for loved ones and family members, I turned to books to escape. Sometimes the characters I used to escape were heroes who looked at the world and tried to make it better. Other times, the characters I read were villains. However, when I read a story, even one whose main character was someone who did bad things, I still grew to understand them, sometimes even root for them. In escaping from the confusing and confining world of my own, I entered the world of others.
A 2012 study by researchers from Dalton State College and Converse College in the US, explains the phenomenon of ‘rooting for the bad guy’. Richard Keen, Monica Powell McCoy and Elizabeth Powell examined how narratives make readers feel empathy. The study used psychological concepts and linked them to literature to conclude that literature makes us feel so deeply for characters because we are given a first-person perspective into their lives and so we avoid blaming actions on the characters themselves but rather blame their circumstances. This is similar to the perspective we take on when examining our own actions. We judge our actions by blaming things outside of our control and rarely blame our own internal thoughts and values for wrongdoings.
Getting lost in these characters has shown me how stories have the potential to make us understand the most incomprehensible situations. Later in life, when covid-19 released its deadlock on our lives, I came across people I couldn’t see eye to eye with, people who hurt me or made me feel inferior but, I had learnt that behind every one of these people who seemed incomprehensible to me, there was a whole story that had led them to where they were. I could not judge them for how they treated me without keeping in mind the villains that I grew to know and love through books. Stories made me feel mercy and empathy in the judgement of the most despicable characters, in books and in life. As there will always be people who hurt me in some way or other, this is something that I like to think I carry with me through life.
As a journalism student and an avid news reader, I notice how often the world and the press in particular refer to people who have done bad things, as bad people. There is little room to explain how factors beyond their control lead people to where they find themselves in the latest gossip or news article. I believe literature is such a valuable art form because through it, while escaping from my own life, I have entered the lives of others and lived how they have lived. It is so important to keep in mind that we judge the actions of others differently to how we judge ourselves, unless we know their whole story. But there is always a whole story. I hope to carry this idea into my own practice of journalism and avoid creating two dimensional characters out of multi-dimensional people.
Immersing myself in nature around Johannesburg boosts my mental and physical wellbeing.
Midway through my second year at Wits I was struggling with mental health issues. It became difficult to set goals, meet deadlines, and to attend crucial lectures. This caused my academic work to suffer, and my marks to drop. I also lost interest in things that I had once loved.
As overwhelming and isolating as my depression felt, it is not an uncommon occurrence. According to a 2022 paper by the Wits/Medical Research Council developmental pathways for health research unit (DPHRU), just over one-quarter of South Africans have probable depression. This fluctuates from province to province – with the highest rates in the Northern Cape, Eastern Cape, Western Cape, Gauteng and Mpumalanga.
One day, my friends called me to come on a walk with them. Not really understanding why people would walk for fun, I hesitantly went along.
Important to note is that, at the time, I was not able to see much good about what was around me. My mindset was extremely negative towards Joburg – the bad clouded the good.
We drove to a hill near Bedfordview, Ekurhuleni, to get an unobstructed view of the city. I remember sitting on a rock watching the sun set over Joburg. I was in awe of the City of Gold. We sat there well into the evening – chatting, listening to music, and most importantly, enjoying the view of the city.
The Sandton skyline glows in the sunset from the viewpoint of Harvey’s Nature Reserve on Linksfield Ridge. Photo: Seth Thorne
I wanted to do this more often. I wanted to see more of this beautiful city again. I remembered it being beautiful when I was a kid. What I am generally told now is that Joburg is a bad city, so everything about it must be bad… right?
I realised that I had lived in the city for my entire life but had not really seen Joburg.
I decided to set time aside to go on walks and hikes to see Jozi from different perspectives with my friends. It was a big decision because it meant I had to cut into my Netflix time. However, it changed my life forever.
The more I went out to see the city with my friends, the happier I found myself. From watching the sun set on Northcliff Hill, The Wilds in Houghton, and Harvey’s Nature Reserve on Linksfield Ridge, to spending a Saturday at the Neighbourgoods Market in Braamfontein. Seeing Joburg made me mentally and physically healthier. Taking care of your own well-being is known as “personal counselling”. This refers to nurturing one’s own mental health by making use of self-help resources and activities that a person would enjoy.
Techniques can also be learnt, with the Wits Careers Counselling and Development Unit offering some suggestions, which can be accessed by clicking here.
Walks around the city have made me more optimistic about Joburg, and life in general. It is an unbelievably diverse, complex, and misunderstood city that radiates a lot of beauty – if you allow yourself to see it. I also became enthusiastic about university, and my academic performance improved as a result. My suggestion to everyone is to go out and experience the beauty of the world around you. It just may change your life.
Productivity is a prerequisite for functioning in this fast-paced world, but when obsessing over it becomes a measure of one’s success, it can quickly become toxic.(more…)
Since her announcement as the Democratic Alliance’s mayoral candidate for Johannesburg, Helen Zille has dominated national headlines. In this bonus episode of We Should Be Writing podcast, hosts Lulah Mapiye and Bonolo Mokonoto dissect a media meet-and-greet with the mayoral hopeful. From her extensive political résumé to her controversial public utterance, we examine why the Democratic Alliance has chosen Hellen Zille as their candidate for the 2027 local mayoral elections. Additionally, […]
