Tetris Helps Post-Traumatic Stress Victims

For those who know people going through Post-Traumatic stress, it’s a difficult and painful road to recovery. The largest problem is to help the patient limit the ‘flashbacks’ that occur and make the recovery difficult. According to this BBC article, has found an effective way to ward off flashbacks.

UK researchers have conducted a study that has found a potential lead into preventing post-traumatic flashbacks. Volunteers in the research study were present horrific, and terrifying images for thirty minutes. Then the volunteers had to wait for thirty minutes, afterwards some of them were allowed to play a game of Tetris while the others still had to wait with nothing to do.

The volunteers who were allowed to play Tetris had much less flashbacks, than those who simply had to sit and wait longer. According to the researchers, this is a valuable step for fighting post traumatic stress disorder.

Of course there’s a difference between really suffering through an event, and just being subject to images on a TV screen. However, this is the beginning of what could be a productive study and could show that video games can have a positive and profound impact on the world.