Can’t go out? Just go live

Most people are aware of seasonal affective disorder—a period of time during winter months where a higher number of people deal with increased feelings of depression and anxiety, caused by decreased exposure to sunlight.

Now imagine year-long seasonal depression—that’s essentially what the COVID-19 lockdown has been like for a lot of people in the United States, many of whom are working from home or avoiding public spaces to account for social distancing. 

As of April 23, 2021, 406 days have passed since former President Donald Trump declared the pandemic a national emergency. For some people living in the U.S., this means it has been 406 days since they last saw any of their friends in person. 

This was the case for Bree McCullough.

“My contact with people is extremely limited,” said McCullough, a variety streamer on Twitch, a platform that hosts live video streams. “I live alone and no longer go into the office due to the pandemic. I don’t see anyone. I don’t have family or a lot of friends in the area, my boyfriend lives an hour away and is also immunocompromised, so I was extremely lonely, severely depressed, and I didn’t know how I was going to make it through the pandemic because I was so miserable all of the time.”

Socializing is important to our wellbeing, and in fact, studies show that it’s just as important to our health as food, water and sleep. Regardless of access to a variety of opportunities for socialization, living through a global pandemic is undoubtedly stressful. According to a series of surveys conducted in 2020 by the National Center for Health Statistics, adults feeling symptoms of anxiety increased by 24.7 percent from 2019, while adults feeling symptoms of depression increased by 20 percent.

Mental health professionals have seen a huge influx of people seeking therapy and counseling since the lockdown began. According to Laura Miles, an associate art therapist at Alexandria Art Therapy, her office has seen so many inquiries from new clients that they’ve had to double their staff.

“We have been incredibly busy. Prior to the lockdown, I was working [at Alexandria Art Therapy] part-time, and the rest of my time was spent working in a hospital,” Miles said. “Our waitlist is so long that I had to leave my position at the hospital to work in our office full-time.”

And she says that many of her colleagues are having similar experiences, especially with having full waitlists.

McCullough, who works full-time as a multimedia specialist in Pittsburgh, enjoys watching Let’s Players on Twitch, a platform that hosts live video streams where viewers can engage with the streamer and each other through an associated chat. Let’s Players are content creators who play video games, sometimes with commentary.

Seeking opportunities for social interaction, McCullough began participating in chat and joined Discord servers.

Discord is a voice and instant messaging platform that aims to foster the creation and growth of digital communities. The company, which primarily targets gaming communities, says that it has more than 100 million active users each month.

“[These communities] are so wholesome,” McCullogh said. “Everyone in the community knows each other. You hop on in for the day and say ‘hi,’ and they greet you, they’re asking you how you are … We get together and play games together.

“It’s a safe place you can go when you’re having a bad day, if you need to talk to someone. You have a whole community there supporting you. It feels like I’m sitting in a room with all of my closest friends, just joking around,” she said. “We always say that we have abs, because we will laugh until it physically hurts.”

Viewers can chat with each other and the streamer through the live chat.

Nick Bowman, associate professor of journalism at Texas Tech University, and an expert in how humans communicate through video games, said that these experiences are not unusual.

“There are very social games which allow us to connect with people,” Bowman said. “We know that depression and loneliness are heavily correlated, and especially in times like COVID where we are socially distanced from each other, video games provide a really good solution to still have authentic and meaningful human interactions, [while] doing it in a very safe way.

“Even though we might be alone, video games allow us to be together.”

McCullough, who is known online as Brellavis, joined Twitch and Discord in mid-2020, and it wasn’t long before she was an established member of multiple communities. She was so well known that she was selected to be a moderator for one of these communities, someone who ensures that people follow the community’s rules and keep the environment safe and fun.

By the end of the year she said she was so engaged in her new communities that she wanted to create her own.

Now a Twitch affiliate—meaning that she can run ads during her streams to make a small profit—McCullough has 125 followers and more than 50 subscribers, with a growing community on Discord.

“It just feels like I’m sitting in a room with all of my closest friends, just joking around, McCullough said. “And I got a little emotional about it because growing up, I never really had a bunch of friends and I haven't had a lot of close friends, and experiences like that. It's always been like one or two just really good friends that I've had, but to just be a part of a community and to be welcomed and accepted, no matter who you are or what you’re like—it's just such a good feeling.”

And she isn’t alone. According to Twitch, there are more than two million active streamers, which leads to countless subcommunities, not to mention other communities from sites like YouTube.

“It’s such a good way to connect with people and actually feel like you’re hanging out with someone when you physically can’t,” McCullough said. “Even though it’s just a virtual icon—you’re just little pixels and they’re little pixels—it feels like you’re genuinely hanging out with them, more so than a phone call because there’s a visual aspect and you’re playing a game.”

While a gamer may be surrounded by a bunch of “little pixels,” there’s scientific evidence that suggests players can actually identify with their characters in-game.

“We have research showing that people can form really human connections with their in-game characters to where they actually care about the characters, and not just because they want to win the game, but because the person might actually have a vested interest in the characters,” Bowman said. “After all, if you’re playing a game, you accept their reality as an authentic one. It can be really important for a lot of people, especially folks suffering from depression.”

It can feel like an escape, McCullough said.

“You can get on Twitter and spend time on Twitter, but you can only look at the same devastating headlines so many times [before they start] to have an affect on your mental health,” she said. “There’s only so much you can do, but being able to take a break and play a video game—the other stuff, the news or whatever it may be, it doesn’t matter.”

If you or someone you know is dealing with thoughts of anxiety or depression, you can chat with a Crisis Text Line counselor 24/7 for free by texting HOME to 741741.