01:53 - Michael’s Superpower: Networking and Community Building

• Being Driven to Fulfill Needs


• Mental Health First Aid


• Working in Proximity / Keeping In Touch


• MAPS at Burning Man

10:36 - Defining Mental Health

• Self-Invalidation & Dialectics


• Money buys happiness, but euphoria comes dear


• Boots Theory of Socioeconomic Unfairness


• Decolonizing Wealth


• Mental Health First Aid
  
  
  
  
  • Youth
  
  
  • Teen
  
  
  • Older Adults
    
  
  
  • Aboriginal & Torres Strait Islander
  
  

20:09 - Involving Gaming in Engaging in Talk Therapy

• Jane McGonigal How GAMING Can Make A Better World TED Talk


• Counselling with Mike: The Nerd Therapist


• The Nerd Therapist (Facebook)


• Pop Culture Competence by The Nerd Therapist
  
  
  
  
  • Grand Theft Auto 101
  
  
  • Five Nights at Freddy’s 101
  
  
  • Call of Duty 101
  
  
  • Among Us 101
  
  

31:13 - “Age-Appropriate Horror”

• Critters


• Starship Troopers


• Civilization VI

38:45 - Social Media, Media, and Mental Health: Curate & Engage Responsibly

• Rick and Morty


• BoJack Horseman


• Zootopia


• Inside Out


• Onward


• Avengers: Endgame
  
  
  
  
  • Worthiness: Character Spotlight: Thor
  
  

50:41 - The Geek Therapy Community

• Mike's Facebook Page


• The Spoon Theory
  
  
  
  
  • Spell Slots and Spoon Theory
  
  

55:16 - Connect with Mike!

• linktr.ee/thenerdtherapist


• D&D Therapy


• Warhammer 40,000


• Minecraft

59:14 - Intergenerational & Epigenetic Trauma

• My Grandmother's Hands: Racialized Trauma and the Pathway to Mending Our Hearts and Bodies by Resmaa Menakem


• Epigenetics

Reflections:

John: Coyote & Crow Role Playing Game + Using Role Playing and Game Playing to treat mental health.

I’m Begging You To Play Another RPG (Facebook Group)

Mae: The pragmatic approach to seeing where people are and meeting them there.

Casey: Helping middle schoolers talk to friends in a structured way.

Mike: The hardest part about doing something is helping people know you’re doing it.

Tall Poppy Syndrome

Bristol Children’s Hospital: Oath of Accessibility: “Anyone can be a hero. Everyone deserves to go on an adventure.”

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Transcript:

PRE-ROLL: Software is broken, but it can be fixed. Test Double’s superpower is improving how the world builds software by building both great software and great teams. And you can help! Test Double is hiring empathetic senior software engineers and DevOps engineers. We work in Ruby, JavaScript, Elixir and a lot more. Test Double trusts developers with autonomy and flexibility at a remote, 100% employee-owned software consulting agency. Looking for more challenges? Enjoy lots of variety while working with the best teams in tech as a developer consultant at Test Double. Find out more and check out remote openings at link.testdouble.com/greater.

JOHN: Welcome to Greater Than Code, Episode 258. I'm John Sawers and I'm here with Mae.

MAE: Hi, there! Also with us is Casey Watts.

CASEY: Hi, I'm Casey, and we're all here today with Mike, The Nerd Therapist.

Mike is a mental health counselor from Perth, Western Australia, and he does geeky therapy. He runs programs in which they use video games and tabletop games in therapy like Civ, Minecraft, Fortnite, and Dungeons and Dragons.

Mike also writes the Pop Culture Competence project, which is a resource for parents, teachers, and therapists and seeks to boost professionals’ awareness and understanding of the themes and applications of Nerd Culture.

Welcome, Mike.

MIKE: Hey, thanks for having me.

CASEY: All right. It's time for that question we prepared you for. We want to know, Mike to kick off the episode, what is your superpower and how did you acquire it?

MIKE: My superpower, I'd say I've been told by people whose opinions I trust is networking. In my last job, I was actually known to a few people before I even got there. And then in my previous job, when I worked in school counseling, I knew most of the applicants for new roles and I knew before the manager of our agency knew that they'd been picked up for jobs.

Yeah, I love community and I found this out after recovering from social anxiety, that I just love community and building networks and meeting people. And that's evolved very naturally into creating professional spaces and working in professional spaces and just getting to know and to meet people.

CASEY: That's awesome. How did you acquire this skill, networking and community building?

MIKE: When I see a need, I'm driven to fill it, which that may actually have been a better answer to begin with, but hey, we're committed to this answer.

So during my degree, we had an opportunity to do some training in a program called Mental Health First Aid. It's a really good piece of training, it's meant for like bystander civilian level people, but it's a professional grade training. It's really good. My university said, “You have to organize this. So just organize this on your own time, but we thought this might be cool to share with you.” So I contact the traine