Welcome to Public Health On Call, a podcast from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health,

where we bring evidence, experience, and perspective to make sense of today's leading health challenges.

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That's Public Health Question at jh.edu for future podcast episodes.

Hi listeners, it's Lindsay Smith Rogers. Today, a conversation with Michelle Colder-Carris, a digital mental

health researcher about how an online gaming community became a way for veterans to help one another

through mental health crises and to prevent suicides. Let's listen. Michelle Colder-Carris,

thank you so much for joining us on public health on call. Your research deals with gaming and mental health.

Could you tell us a little bit about your work?

Yeah, of course.

So interesting story behind it, actually.

When I was a PhD student in the Department of Mental Health in 2011,

I learned about the work that was being done

on the social aspects and potential benefits of gaming that was just kind of starting up

in other fields outside of public health. And I decided to study that for my thesis. But at the

time, in public health, games and video gaming were considered a negative exposure,

you know, like playing violent video games or becoming addicted. So I was told that I could study

video game addiction. I managed to find some research in the public health field that was looking at

social interactions in games and their

relationship to game addiction. So I began with that and I used a person-centered statistical approach

to try to separate out some factors that might contribute to benefits of games and problems people

develop. And so tell us a little bit about what you learn.

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