Tetris for Trauma – Unconventional Approaches to Trauma Prevention

When looking for a blog post subject, I decided that I wanted to learn more about the latest updates in trauma care. As we have seen in class and in our readings, trauma care has changed significantly over the last few decades. For example, in van der Kolk’s book The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind and Body, he discusses an old belief that in the case of father-daughter incents, “incestuous activity diminishes the subject’s chance of psychosis and allows for a better adjustment to the external world”. This is clearly not an opinion that we would take today and demonstrates the progress made in psychological research. 

So what are some of the newer ideas about trauma? One of the ones that caught my attention was playing “Tetris” as a potential trauma prevention. This idea was presented in the article “Can playing Tetris help prevent PTSD if you’ve witnessed something traumatic?”(Bressington & Mitchell, 2024). It seems to have first been proposed in 2009 by Oxford University psychologists. They suggest that playing a visuospatial game like “Tetris”, within 30 minutes after a traumatic event may disrupt the formation of sight and sound memories related to the traumatic event. This is because trauma flashbacks are sensory-perceptual, visuospatial mental images. Therefore, when a visuospatial game like “Tetris” is played within the time usually reserved for memory consolidation, it fights for the brain’s resources and leads to reduced flashbacks (Holmes et al., 2009).

While this research was done over a decade ago, more recent research has also shown success in using “Tetris” to prevent PTSD flashbacks as well as potentially reducing depression and anxiety in combat veterans (Butler et al., 2020). Additionally, in a randomized controlled trial, “Tetris” was found to be an effective intervention to reduce intrusive memories overall and lead to declined intrusive memories for emergency department patients who had experienced motor vehicle crashes. Patients found this intervention easy, helpful, and minimally distressing (Iyadurai et al., 2018). Another study suggested the use of “Tetris” and other verbal word games to reduce intrusive memories (Hagenaars et al., 2017). 

Although this research has not been implemented into most people’s mental health practices in the medical community, it is frequently offered as advice to people seeking help after a traumatic situation on Reddit. An example presented in the Bressington and Mitchell article is from a Reddit poster in Sydney, Australia looking for advice on dealing with a traumatic situation (saltyisthesauce, 2024). Additionally, if you just type in “Tetris for PTSD” in the Reddit search, numerous posts advocating for “Tetris” playing can be found, especially for visually disturbing traumatic situations. While obviously, this is not research and not normally something I would cite, for this blog post in exploring the topic, I thought it would be worth noting as it demonstrates that the idea has spread outside of the research world and has some acceptance in the general public. 

For my own opinion on the subject, I really like the idea of “Tetris” as a potential trauma prevention. One of its main draws is its accessibility. “Tetris” is freely available to anyone who owns a phone or computer. This makes it much more accessible than most trauma treatments such as medications or therapy. This also means it is more accessible financially and for groups who may not traditionally utilize healthcare. Additionally, it presents a way to prevent PTSD in the first place, as its mechanism of action is to interrupt memory formation instead of responding to the trauma after the fact. This could have important implications for the future of trauma research as preventing trauma from occurring is better than having to deal with the side effects after the fact. Therefore, after a traumatic event, the idea of playing “Tetris” presents an easily actionable, potentially beneficial, step instead of ruminating about the traumatic event. I’m excited to see future research on this topic and hope to see more unconventional PTSD treatments like it in the future. 

Citations

Bressington, D., & Mitchell, D. A. (2024, April 15). Can playing Tetris help prevent PTSD if you’ve witnessed something traumatic? The Conversation. http://theconversation.com/can-playing-tetris-help-prevent-ptsd-if-youve-witnessed-something-traumatic-226736

Butler, O., Herr, K., Willmund, G., Gallinat, J., Kühn, S., & Zimmermann, P. (2020). Trauma, treatment and Tetris: Video gaming increases hippocampal volume in male patients with combat-related posttraumatic stress disorder. Journal of Psychiatry and Neuroscience, 45(4), 279–287. https://doi.org/10.1503/jpn.190027

Hagenaars, M. A., Holmes, E. A., Klaassen, F., & Elzinga, B. (2017). Tetris and Word games lead to fewer intrusive memories when applied several days after analogue trauma. European Journal of Psychotraumatology, 8(sup1), 1386959. https://doi.org/10.1080/20008198.2017.1386959

Holmes, E. A., James, E. L., Coode-Bate, T., & Deeprose, C. (2009). Can Playing the Computer Game “Tetris” Reduce the Build-Up of Flashbacks for Trauma? A Proposal from Cognitive Science. PLoS ONE, 4(1), e4153. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0004153

Iyadurai, L., Blackwell, S. E., Meiser-Stedman, R., Watson, P. C., Bonsall, M. B., Geddes, J. R., Nobre, A. C., & Holmes, E. A. (2018). Preventing intrusive memories after trauma via a brief intervention involving Tetris computer game play in the emergency department: A proof-of-concept randomized controlled trial. Molecular Psychiatry, 23(3), 674–682. https://doi.org/10.1038/mp.2017.23

saltyisthesauce. (2024, April 13). What just happened at Bondi junction? [Reddit Post]. R/Sydney. www.reddit.com/r/sydney/comments/1c2uo3p/what_just_happened_at_bondi_junction/kzd8t6u/

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