Page to Pixel Publishing

Find Your Sense of Belonging with Video Games:
Center for Suicide Awareness

Nothing compares to the community you feel when being a part of the video game industry.

There are numerous development studios, publishers, streamers, moderators, you name it! Everywhere you look there is a new video game store on every corner, an upcoming convention, or even a new friend that “only plays a little video games” until they feel comfortable enough with you to share how much they really play. There are also a wide-range of incredible nonprofits in the industry that are solely focused on giving back and making the world a better place. 

As part of our small way of giving back, we are starting a blog series highlighting companies and how they are helping gamers through mental health, streaming, hospital visits, and more! We interviewed an inspiring group of companies about who they are, what they do, their impact on the gaming industry, and how others can get involved. We hope you enjoy reading them and are inspired to go help your community, no matter how small the task.

This week, we continue our series with the Center for Suicide Awareness, where we had the honor of interviewing the Founder, Barb Bigalke. The Center for Suicide Awareness (CSA) is an organization that helps prevent suicide and bring awareness to the topic through their HOPELINE™, events around the country, and through resources and partnerships. The Founder, Barb Bigalke, walked us through the details of CSA from the start and where they are now, all the way to the future. Let’s get to it!

The History of Center for Suicide Awareness

Let’s start from the beginning… 

Unlike what many people believe, Barb did not create the Center for Suicide Awareness due to suicide in her close circle, but yet from dealing with the stigma of suicide while working at the Department of Justice as Head of the Victim Crisis team. She started with an awareness walk, as a safe space for people to share and connect, with just having the hope “to have a safe place for people to share their grief journey.”

With that walk came a documentary sharing stories and offering help to others. She never expected that documentary to win a Telly Award and be “used for training in multiple colleges across the world. In 2014, CSA took the leap of faith and created the HOPELINE™ – the emotional support text line. Texting was a newer way to handle crises then and, to be honest, it was not really well received nor supported in [this] area as it was “out of the box” thinking. [She] remembers very vividly thinking “I have no clue if people will really use this line”, yet [she] knew that texting was the way youth communicated and they still had one of the highest suicide rates.” Using funds from a “meat raffle and a golf event”, it was started. She calls it her “creative fundraising” and now ten years later, it has helped thousands of people and simply put, has changed the world. Barb feels that “it is always an honor when someone approaches [her] and says “your HOPELINE saved my life”. It makes all the difficult hurdles disappear!”

The Link Between Mental Health and Video Games

Though there are good and bad sides to the video game industry, the connection with mental health sways towards the good side. There is a large selection of games that can help with mental health disorders such as Anxiety, Depression, PTSD, Grief, and more. Child’s Play Game Guide dives deeper into this and how it can help get you through tough times. One that came to mind for Barb was called Feather. Its beautiful views and calming sounds have a neurological calming effect in your brain, which is much needed in this fast-paced, overstimulating world. With Page to Pixel currently publishing a game based around mental health battles called Interwoven Emotions coming out in June, portraying these emotions and the feelings of the player is definitely at the forefront of our minds as well. 

Another more “hidden connection, is that gaming provides a community. A community based on the common theme of video games. We need to change the way we view community in that it no longer is the person who lives on my street – it could be the person in another state or even country. Yet that person has a common joy for the game, and with that community comes a sense of belonging. Different from fitting in – which we often do in our world. We just try to fit in and not feel comfortable being our authentic selves. Belonging gives us purpose and safety, safety to be our true selves, and belonging is a huge protective factor for suicide prevention. When we feel like we have purpose and we feel like we truly belong, we have a resilience factor and that is a key to suicide prevention.” Just because your friends are virtual, does not make them any less valuable. 

Ditch the Stigma

The first step in preventing suicide is talking about it. The Center for Suicide Awareness has “been honored to be at all the PAX spaces for over 5 years and have had numerous conversations with gamers on how to help with mental wellness, as well as, how to break the stigma around it. We can’t work on something if we don’t talk about it! Even if it is uncomfortable”. At Page to Pixel, we make sure to incorporate mental health awareness, embrace community in what we publish, and do not allow any hate on our channels. Sometimes it’s the smallest steps that have the biggest impact.

Moderating Your Spaces and Creating a Safe Environment

When moderating a Discord, Twitch, or even Reddit page, there is a certain responsibility that you uphold. The Center for Suicide Awareness has partnered with the video game industry and saved thousands on its platforms. With so many content creators and moderators, it is not enough to just talk about it, we need to teach it. To prevent suicide in the gaming industry, the Center for Suicide Awareness tries to “provide skill sets to know the warning signs of suicide, as well as, how to take good care of your mental health. [They] have done training in platforms like Youtube and Twitch, as well as, recently doing a workshop at PAX East on how moderators of their space can recognize when people come into their space and have a need to talk and when that should be offline vs. directly to them. Many people come into those spaces with heavy struggles, yet many moderators do not have the skill sets to handle all of those issues. We hear the words “trauma dumping” which sometimes occurs in those spaces… This could create an unsafe space for others, so how to handle and maybe even de-escalate, are tools we can help with.” 

In this PAX East workshop, Center for Suicide Awareness partnered with Stream for a Cause to launch Pixel Care, “an educational workshop that people can get certified in. It is the understanding of the language of mental health: what words can help escalate or calm the human brain, what are boundaries and how to we set them and enforce them, what to do when someone is struggling, including yourself, what does self care even look like, as well as self love. It is three different modules all based on evidence-based methods to help navigate mental wellness.” Special interview guest, Founder of Stream for a Cause and Co-Founder of Pixel Care, Robbie Miller, also chimed in to say how “Pixel Care was born out of the desire for us to better equip our volunteer content creators with tools to be mental health navigators for their communities. So often, content creators encounter situations where someone in their community reaches out to them for help, and when they do, we want our creators to be able to safely and responsibly engage in techniques to keep themselves and their communities in a healthy place. It is all about equipping people with the right tools in their toolbelt to make a difference.” 

Working together on this was a no-brainer for either company. Not only is creating a safe space important for both of them, but Barb mentioned how she’s honored to partner and “lift each other up in [their] missions and do double the good work.” Robbie goes on to say how “ when [they] decided this was a program [they] wanted to pursue, it was natural to reach out to Barb at the Center for Suicide Awareness, whom [they] had worked with before, to help guide [them] in creating a program that was effective and responsible and that kept cutting edge mental health conversations at the forefront of the discussion.” Needless to say, both companies are grateful to be working together on this and we look forward to seeing them change the moderating world for the better.

Know Your Resources

“Crisis doesn’t just mean thinking about ending your own life…. Crisis can be anything from a stressful day, to a breakup, to a loss of a job.” To prevent things like suicide, we have to understand the build-up, which can start with those bad days. With crisis being such a personal experience, there needs to be personal things to turn to when you are dealing with one. Barb recommends utilizing the HOPELINE™ and always having two main coping skills, which can vary for everyone and even change throughout life. Examples she gives of this are:

  1. Breathwork
    • Notice your breath when you are stressed
    • Practice box breathing
  2. Tapping
    • Understanding where certain points on your face/body can help relieve anxiety
  3. Grounding
    • Put your feet on the earth and recharge your purpose

Do Your Part and Take Action

One important takeaway that the Center for Suicide Awareness hopes people will learn when hearing about their organization, especially as it relates to the video game industry, is “that gaming brings a sense of belonging, and when a person feels like they belong, it can help prevent suicide. [Their] mission is to prevent suicide and meeting people where they are at is one of [their] goals to accomplish that.”

To learn more, please visit https://www.centerforsuicideawareness.org.

Thank You

Special thank you to Barb Bigalke for partnering with Page to Pixel Publishing on this interview to further spread awareness about this incredible mission. Have an idea for a company that could use a highlight? Reach out!

Remember: If you or someone you know is struggling, text HOPELINE™ to 741741. You are not alone. Hope and Help is just a text away.