Healing Broken Brains: A Journey into Psychonauts 2
Mental health is a strange reality. Because brains have heavy plasticity and are sensitive to experiences, there are so many variables to try to manage mental health. And because there are no magical bullet solutions to maintain equilibrium which will work for always and for all time, how do we know what solution will work in any particular circumstance? Are there any principles which might be helpful in a large percentage of mental health situations? Psychonauts 2 gives a fun look at mental health. This post will contain mild spoilers but I’ll try to keep the descriptions mostly general. I recommend this game for all people to see the story but for those who are collectors, they will really like the amount of items to collect.
Raz, the main character is a psychonaut intern. The Psychonauts are an organization dedicated to protecting the world from the consequences of those abusing psychic abilities. During your first missions, it becomes clear that the people in the university are suffering from significant mental illness and to solve the mysteries plaguing the Psychonauts you will have to travel inside people’s brains to understand their experiences and help get rid of the imprints lodged into some of the Psychonauts’ brains. This journey takes you through regret, deceit, and propaganda, and I want to highlight some of the main insights I have found throughout my play of Psychonauts 2.
1) Isolation makes mental illness significantly worse when out of balance with deep community engagement. This spoke to me because I like my alone time. I often find social engagement and being in public exhausting, and particularly so since the Covid-19 pandemic. However, if I were to just go into an isolation chamber with no contact from anyone, I would lose all sense of normalcy even though I like alone time. Sensory deprivation chambers in very small doses can help the feeling of overwhelm as well as retreats into nature. The balance is having a deep community, people with whom you can be yourself, and making intentional time to be in relationship with them and making space for intentional time to heal and revitalize yourself. This balance will be different for every person.
2) Narrative formation, propaganda, and value formation have a strong effect on whether behavior is moral even if the behavior is harmful to oneself or others. The question I have had to ask myself often in my career is whether building my work for justice is just giving fake credence that my organization cares for the common good. I personally fight with all of my available information for the common good but overall my organization harms people. Institutions often convince people to harm themselves or the common good, often for the benefit of their most elite leaders. There is a long arc about the major conflict of the game and viewing it from both perspectives. Both sides have conflicting narratives which lead them to do horrific things to the other. Mentally it is exhausting to step outside of our tribal narratives to examine the world from another’s perspective.
However, to prevent the third point below, it is better to do the hard work of examining our standard of behavior so we do not do regrettable things to others. Moral discernment is best done with a community of people because it is easy when stepping out of narrative formation to build a morality which is self-serving. Subjective morality does not mean immorality, it is a life of discerning through various possible narratives and finding what rings true and what is missing in accord with your own conscience. Objective morality narrows who is viewed as a member of the community and as such has built in methods of excusing behavior. Ideally, these processes are supposed to help people build better habits for the common good but far too often they become ways to excuse behavior through ritual and never really change.
3) We will always do things we regret and part of finding healing is growth and making safe amends for the harm you have done. I have hurt a lot of people in my life, particularly from believing for a long time that I had the only valid way of living through faith. As I have learned about how my attitudes and behaviors have harmed people, I have sought out the people I have hurt if it was safe to do so for the other person. Being social awkward, deeply opinionated, and lacking an understanding of diversity led me to shout down people, write angry responses online and offline, and not have good boundaries. I have had to do a lot of work on my own trauma processing and the existential dread that my choices mean for a lot of people. I did not have the privilege of having a psychonaut be able to remove the glass shard from my brain in order to fix my repression of memories of inducing pain on others. In real life, we have to do that work on our own with the support of people who consent to be on that journey with us and with good mental health professionals. While social cues and engagement still don’t really make any sense to me, I have a much better base for processing my own confusion and the hurts I have suffered.
Psychonauts 2 is a treasure trove of light-hearted comical humor to engage the serious topic of mental health. There is no right formula for everyone to fix their mental health, but my hope in sharing pieces of my journey is to help people build those first steps toward bettering themselves in the ways they feel are best. It is a long journey to find peace and deal with the regrets you have in your behavior. But if you can take the first step to pulling out the glass shard stuck in your brain, the closer you can get to real honesty and real finding of your own personal values. My next post will finish the Xenoblade Chronicles 3 series looking at the Eternal Now and how that takes advantage of the trauma responses of the Mobius characters in the game. After that I want to write a values post about the values I am hoping to draw from video game reflection now that I have a few weeks of posts on the website. I’m also hoping to record an In Dialogue with the Gaming Community soon as well. If you liked what you read here, I would love to have you join my email list and my Patreon. Put your email address in the form to subscribe and click the Patreon link to support the channel.
