Links to other resources: Residential Treatment, Detox, Type D Personalities
USA Today
I found out today that I spent nearly 1000 hours on Twitch in the last year and a half. For those that don’t know, Twitch is an online community originally known as a sort of “YouTube for Video Gamers”, except unlike YouTube everything is live. YouTube videos may rack up millions of views over the course of months, but on Twitch, where everything is live, 50,000 people is considered a massively successful stream. That key difference in numbers can warp the conversation when discussing Twitch’s overall popularity, but it is safe to say that Twitch is hugely influential for people under 40. I would say under 25, but Twitch has been around for long enough now to see some of the biggest influencers on the medium turn 30, and the communities have matured in some respects. “Just Chatting” is a popular theme for Twitch streams these days, meaning video games are no longer the only source of entertainment. I play chess on Twitch, and without going into too much detail, Twitch and online play has revolutionized the game of chess.
Part of the boom in Twitch over the last several years can be credited to the worldwide Covid-19 pandemic. People were inside more than ever before, many were prohibited from going to bars and restaurants with friends, so online communities flourished. Chess was no exception. However, unlike many other online games, Chess has a real world, real board, version. The World Chess Championship is played on a real board that you can feel and touch, without the use of a mouse or keyboard, but ever since the pandemic started, many other major chess events have moved online. Because Twitch and chess have had a renaissance during a time of chaos for the world, there is an interesting juxtaposition between the flourishing online community and the personal struggles for some people who make up that community. On January 6 2021, I published an article highlighting increased alcohol sales during the pandemic. Depression, anxiety, and addiction among young people were measured at all-time highs throughout 2019 up to today. We already established that Twitch is dominated by young people. A massive boom in the size of online communities, and a boom in the struggles faced by members of those communities, were happening alongside one another.
Tim Cannon and Jeffery Xiong
Does Twitch Help or Hurt Mental Health
We do not have perfect research on whether the average Twitch or Youtube viewer is helped or harmed by their online entertainment habits. We do, however, have good scientific data on how online community engagement affects certain groups. Scientists have looked at people with physical disabilities, people with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD), Teenagers, and people over 60, among many groups. A study published in the journal Behavior and Information Technology found that,
“Young people exchanged a substantial amount of empathic emotional communication when participating in an online support community, and they communicated on a more personal level compared to older people, who tended to engage in a more formal communication.”
Interestingly, that same study found that older adults were more likely to show “concern” for other people in online chat forums, while younger people were more likely to demonstrate “understanding”. A large study was performed in South Korea at the end of 2018 to look at online social community use and well-being among physically disabled young people. South Korea has one of the largest online-engaged communities in the world per capita. The researchers measured depression and general psychological disposition within some of the most popular online communities in the world. The Korean study found that,
“higher levels of intensity of SNS use and of online community use both led to lower levels of depression through the mediation of instrumental and informational support.”
In other words, the more involved these young people were in their chosen online community, the better it was for their mental well-being. The study found higher levels of informational support compared to emotional support. This means it was more common for people in online communities to share information about treatment resources, rather than showing direct emotional support to a peer, however emotional support increases were also found in the research. All four of the studies I looked at for this article showed benefits to mental health from engagement in online communities, mostly with the caveat that those communities provided outlets for peer-to-peer communication. This draws an important distinction between services like YouTube and Twitch. From the perspective of peer-to-peer emotional support, YouTube is more like watching television, while Twitch was filled with the social engagement that was coveted by the researchers in these studies. Arguably the most important aspect of direct peer communication on Twitch comes from the partnership between Twitch and Discord.
Discord, Twitch, and Social Well-being
As mentioned above, a higher intensity of online community use and social networking use can lead to lower levels of depression. As that fact seems reasonably well established, Discord’s role in social networking amongst streaming platform participants cannot be understated. I personally watch several Twitch chess channels most days. Those channels include Chessbrah (Eric Hansen and Amen Hambleton) on twitch, GMJX on Twitch (Jeffery Xiong), and GMHikaru on Twitch (Hikaru Nakamura). Those 3 channels represent 4 of the best chess players in the US and Canada. While all these players have content for viewing on both YouTube and Twitch, it is Twitch, and by extension Discord, where members of those communities can best interact with one another. Discord is a text chat, microphone chat, and video chat app that works alongside Twitch, so that viewers of a particular channel can talk amongst each other when the channels are not live and receive announcements and interaction from the lead creators themselves.
If we were ranking Twitch, YouTube, and Discord by social engagement, YouTube would be worst, with Discord and Twitch being much better, and the latter two are used together by many creators. This makes Discord and Twitch a key combination for offering tools to young people to escape depression through online community engagement. Not through making them forget about their problems by watching mindless content, but instead by connecting them with each other. We already know that young people are quicker than adults when it comes to understanding problems amongst each other. We also learned that young people are very good at sharing information about mental health resources in these online communities, but some community members may need to improve when it comes to sharing direct emotional support. For me personally, the Twitch Chess community has been a new source of social engagement for me during a global pandemic that otherwise made real-world socializing much more difficult. I would recommend anyone who already enjoys YouTube in some capacity to give Twitch a try. If you don’t enjoy video games or other board games like chess, there are exceptional musicians, singers, and talk shows on twitch. Including a fast-growing mental health discussion community, featuring the very popular Dr. Alok Kanojia, known for his channel HealthyGamer_GG.
By T.A. Cannon
References
“A Comparison of Empathic Communication Pattern for Teenagers and Older People in Online Support Communities” Behavior and Information Tech. v30 Pages 617-628.
“Social Media Use and Well-Being in People with Physical Disabilities: Influence of SNS and Online Community Uses on Social Support, Depression, and Psychological Disposition.” Conference Papers. International Communication Association; 2018, pages 1-34.
