The Covid-19 pandemic, and the resultant lockdown has affected each of us in a number of ways. While health and financial issues have been piling up on people across the globe, mental health issues are perhaps the most prevalent. In a bid to address these issues, Riot Games has launched an initiative to aid content creators by designing a free mental health advocacy guide in partnership with The Public Good Projects.
The aim of the guide is to help content creators understand how they can support their viewers who may be suffering from these conditions.
“Improving mental health outreach and support has been one of our key focus areas for a while,” said Riot in the announcement for the initiative. “Unfortunately, the added stress of the global pandemic has taken a toll on people’s mental health—young people in particular. And players have increasingly turned to content creators for mental health support.”
The guide features various steps via which creators can support their fans, including spreading awareness about mental health, how to approach conversations regarding the issue, what to avoid, what kind of language to use, facts that can be dropped during streams, and resources that could be shared.
Riot Games mentioned that it will continue working with The Public Good Projects over the next year to understand more about the “knowledge, behaviors, and attitudes around mental health in the gaming community.”
The PGP is a public health nonprofit that uses science, technology, and evidence-based strategies to create measurable health outcomes to tackle today’s most pressing public health issues like mental health, binge drinking, opioid abuse, school wellness, and reproductive wellness among other things.
The organization is currently also tackling Covid-19 related issues by spreading information and tackling misinformation about vaccines. It has also introduced Project RCAID, which is a service that provides real-time media monitoring with daily analyses from public health experts.
A number of companies have championed mental health over the past two years. Codemasters was promoting UK mental health awareness and COVID-19 campaigns on trackside advertising in its racing games Dirt 5, Dirt Rally 2.0 and GRID. Jagex, the studio behind RuneScape, raised £445,778 for mental health charities. Twitch recently introduced a mental health tag.