Mental Health and the Power of Kind Words

Jason Mical, Contributing Editor

Content warnings: Mental disorders, suicidal ideation, suicide. 

I recently rated the game Kind Words one of my best games of 2020, because in the middle parts of the COVID-19 pandemic, it provided a lifeline for me and (I suspect) others whose letters I read and answered. Kind Words was exactly the kind of thing I needed in my darkest times, and discovering it in 2020 gave me the ability to give back to others who might need that same interaction I did.  

The game’s premise is simple (and you could argue that it’s less a game than a communications portal): your avatar sits at a desk with a music feed similar to the famous Lo-Fi Beats YouTube channel playing. You can either write a letter or read and respond to other people’s letters. The only rule is that your words to others must be kind. That’s it.  

I have struggled my entire adult life--the majority of my 42 years--with the effects of bipolar disorder. It is a vicious and awful mental disorder that feels, in the worst of times, like living in a mirrored funhouse with the lights off. Even if I could see, everything would be so distorted that it would be impossible to tell what’s real.  

During those times, in the darkest of my downcycles, I  tried to reach out to friends, strangers, and frankly anyone who would listen. I’d talk to them online, make phone calls, anything. They often didn’t even know what I was doing--I just needed to talk and have someone recognize me as a person--to be heard. Looking back on those times, Kind Words is the game I wish that I had. Because you may not be able to see or navigate within the funhouse, but sometimes you can shout and hear someone else. And that’s Kind Words. It’s a game, but it’s also a mental health tool.

The Long Dark 

The signs of my mental disorder first appeared in my late teens, got worse in my early 20s, and reached their first “bottom” by the time I was looking at 30. During one particular summer, I stopped setting meetings on my work calendar because I had decided on a certain day to kill myself. I spent hours at my job not working, but posting on the Internet (this was pre-Facebook), and hoping beyond hope someone out there would recognize my pain and talk to me about what I was experiencing. I made random posts on question-and-answer websites (and shitposts on Something Awful) just to get someone to talk to me. I used to sit on public transit and silently scream “notice me, notice how much I’m hurting.” 

No one ever did. 

The thing that saved my life came from an unusual source: my wife was offered a job overseas and she accepted. Moving gave me something to look forward to, something to live for again. When I was overseas I found, through serendipity, an amazing therapist who helped me begin to deal with my mental disorder.

The Need for Kind Words 

I spent many years recovering and reassembling my life. The damage my mental disorder did was immeasurable. It almost destroyed my marriage. It drove friends away. It cost me a job. With intense therapy and a lot of hard work, I bounced back until almost a decade later, when a series of events still too tender to talk about knocked me back into another downcycle just as bad as before. This one required the use of a newish treatment called Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation to address (and I would absolutely recommend looking into that treatment for anyone reading this and thinking they might need additional help).  

Two months after TMS finished the world went to hell.  

I discovered Kind Words in April or May of 2020, having read about it in an article about games related to mental health. I thought it was incredible that there was a tool out there that matched exactly what I needed in my darkest of times.  

I made an account and logged in, reading all kinds of different letters from all kinds of people. There were people who didn’t know how to come out to their families, people struggling with the loneliness and isolation of lockdown, and people who just needed to talk and be heard. The letters said things like “I just expected life to feel better,” and “I wish someday, someone would make me happy too.”  

I answered a few, always taking great care to choose my words well. Knowing what a tender state I was in when I was down, I didn’t want to inadvertently make anyone’s experience worse. I received several “thanks” in response, so I knew my replies had landed and been read. For two weeks, I made Kind Words a daily routine, and as I lifted others, I felt myself lifting at the same time. Rising tides and boats really is true.

Kindness Rules 

The simple beauty of Kind Words for me is that it enables a basic human need--the need to connect and be heard. When online discussions reward the loudest, shrillest, and meanest voices, Kind Words instead gives a voice to the voiceless and, possibly, hope to the hopeless. I can’t help but see my own experience in it, and keep my fingers crossed that when I dip back into it to answer a letter or two, I can listen to someone else whose voice is out there in the dark. 

There’s an adage in mental health practice, taken from airline safety protocols: “secure your own mask before helping others.” The idea is that before you give too much of yourself to other people, you should make sure you’ve got the capacity to help. Otherwise both parties will end up with less.  

Kind Words rides the line between both of these things. If your capacity is depleted, you can ask for help. If your capacity is full enough, you can be the helper. You could even do both--write your own letter and answer others’. It’s a truly remarkable creation and one that provides a much-needed means of connection for people who find themselves in the darkest places. 

It offers small pieces of gamification: you can earn and collect “trophies” for helping people when the person you choose to respond to sends you a copy of one of their trophies. They serve no purpose except to give to others who help you in turn, and to display in your little room.

Otherwise there are no achievements, scores, or rewards--other than intrinsic ones--for writing or answering one letter or a hundred. Is it a game? In the sense that Jane McGonigal describes health tools as games in Reality is Broken, yes. It’s a method of processing feelings and lifting up yourself and others, and what are games except ways to help make ourselves feel better? 

As the pandemic drags on, insurrectionists attempt to stage a violent coup in the United States, and we’re all collectively trying to figure out how to cope with persistent sources of trauma, tools like Kind Words are more important than ever. If you have the capacity--or need it--it may be a brilliant tool to add to your toolbelt.

For more in our “Shortest Day, Longest Night” series, read Tof Eklund on depression, death, and survival in Iris and the Giant and Roger Whitson on keeping the company of cats in game and in life.