CHESS PLAYING AND MENTAL HEALTH

Discuss anything you like about chess related matters in this forum.
Phil Makepeace
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Re: CHESS PLAYING AND MENTAL HEALTH

Post by Phil Makepeace » Mon May 21, 2012 10:51 am

I've elaborated on my own experiences here.

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IM Jack Rudd
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Re: CHESS PLAYING AND MENTAL HEALTH

Post by IM Jack Rudd » Mon May 21, 2012 10:59 am

Phil Makepeace wrote:I've elaborated on my own experiences here.
That piece resonates very well with my own experiences of depression. Kudos for writing that.

Nick Burrows
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Re: CHESS PLAYING AND MENTAL HEALTH

Post by Nick Burrows » Mon May 21, 2012 12:40 pm

I think most of us here on this chess dedicated website will be familiar with a certain level obsession about the game. It seems to be a common phenomena across people attracted to chess. With obsession comes the price of the neglect of other areas of life. Mental health could also be called mental balance - spending the majority of your waking hours fixated on anything is not balanced, when the object of your fixation is thought/memory/visualisation/pattern recognition the chances of becoming dangerously imbalanced increases.
We are mammals who are made to inhabit their body's. I believe it is the disconnection with our physical selves that causes depression. If your mental self becomes your sole reality, then you become divorced from your whole self and reality.

Body, Mind & Soul

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Matt Mackenzie
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Re: CHESS PLAYING AND MENTAL HEALTH

Post by Matt Mackenzie » Mon May 21, 2012 1:12 pm

I can relate to much of the above myself - though in my case it was slightly different, I gave up playing seriously - bar a handful of one day events - for a few years. Almost certainly this was connected with depression (though it was never actually confirmed medically) caused in large part through the frustrations of having a, then undiagnosed, autistic spectrum disorder condition. It was a great help to me when this was officially confirmed at the turn of the millennium.
"Set up your attacks so that when the fire is out, it isn't out!" (H N Pillsbury)

Giulio Simeone
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Re: CHESS PLAYING AND MENTAL HEALTH

Post by Giulio Simeone » Mon May 21, 2012 1:59 pm

Joey Stewart wrote:
Sure chess is not 'normal' by the standards of our society, made up largely of mindless drones who desparately try and 'fit in' whatever social group they belong to. The idea that somebody could focus on an activity for more then 30 minutes is certainly not usual behavior to such people, who prefer to focus on irrelevent material and set meaningless goals that they have to achieve in order to be the same as everybody else.
Uhm ... speaking as a great chess lover, isn't chess also a "meaningless goal" and an attempt to fit in, sometimes to take the lead of, a social group? I think that chess is so attractive because it can bring people to another world, and can make people forget the real one. In certain conditions, it's very difficult to get some quick satisfaction from our life, our work, our relationships: chess can give you that, you have only to sign up to a tournament, to defeat a strong player and you feel on the top of the world. The same thing happen to sport supporters, I think that chess players are a bit better than them because sport supporters only watch the games, chess players take directly part into them. The opportunity to stop thinking about our problems for many hours is indeed a positive thing: when chess drives you completely out of the real world, though, it can be dangerous, because life cannot be only chess.

David Gilbert
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Re: CHESS PLAYING AND MENTAL HEALTH

Post by David Gilbert » Mon May 21, 2012 2:06 pm

There’s no evidence that chess players are more (or less) likely to develop mental health problems than the general population. I was once told that anaesthetists were the most successful suicide victims - they know exactly the correct amount of drugs needed and any surviving anaesthetist wasn’t really serious! I’d actually wondered whether chess was used as a therapy for people with mental health problems - but several senior psychiatrists have me told it wasn’t part of any therapy they knew. Shame then that the ‘cure’ in London Wainwright III’s song (covered by Johnny Cash) for “the man who couldn’t cry” probably doesn’t work.

“He was taken from jail and placed in a place
For the insensitive and the insane
He made lots of friends and played a lot of chess
And he cried every time it would rain”


One slightly interesting, but very small, study undertaken in Spain seems to show that Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) can improve performance among chess players. ACT is a different type of Cognitive Behaviour Therapy (CBT) which broadly deals with anxiety by accepting it, as opposed to challenging it. That's my definition, but not a necessarily a clinical one.

Psicothema. 2009 Aug;21(3):347-52.
Acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT) and improving chess performance in promising young chess-players.
Ruiz FJ, Luciano C.
Source
Universidad de Almería, Facultad de Psicología, Almería, Spain.

Abstract
Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) is shown to be effective in relatively distant fields from the so-called psychological disorders. One of these areas is sport performance improvement. The aim of the current study is to expand the application of brief ACT protocols to improve chess-players' performance. In a previous study, a brief protocol was applied to international-level adult chess-players that was effective. The current study aims to apply an equivalent brief ACT protocol, but in this case, applied in a group format to promising young chess-players. In addition, this brief protocol is compared to a non-intervention control condition. Results show that the ACT brief protocol improved the performance in 5 out of 7 participants, and that none of the chess-players in the control condition reached the established change criterion. The differences between the conditions in chess performance were statistically significant. The results are discussed, emphasizing the replicated impact of a brief ACT protocol on the improvement of chess-players' performance.

PeterTurland
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Re: CHESS PLAYING AND MENTAL HEALTH

Post by PeterTurland » Mon May 21, 2012 9:05 pm

Thousands of years ago, Plato said we should separate passion from reason, or put in a more modern idiom, separate logic from emotion.

Because of what we now know in terms of neurology - I'd say, how right he was!

Logic is what makes a computer tick, by virtue of Boolean algebra, George Boole must have had little idea of the bombshell he dropped on us, that did not explode, till well over two hundred years after his death, with the likes of Babbage, Shockley, Shannon, Von Neumann and Turing, basically they proved logic can be enshrined with just switches, the fact that hardly any of us can beat our telephones at chess, given the right phone and the right software. But, and it is a very large but, our neurons either fire or they do not, this is evidence for a binary process, it would not surprise me if Boolean algebra was discovered in brain functions somewhere.

So now to the other part of the equation, emotion, a good name to Google with is Maslow.

Looking at our brains in an evolutionary sense and we are looking at an onion, with the bits going to the middle of the onion, going further back in evolutionary terms. We share parts of our brain structure with other species. You can dissect a mouse brain and find the same structures, such as the thalamus, the cerebellum, two lobes, the hippocampus. Dissect the reptile brain and you will find a limbic system, we have a limbic system.

But the only intrinsic difference between a mouse brain and human brain, is the number of cells assigned to it's different modules. Before anyone jumps on me for the use of the term 'modules' I can't think of another term that fits for an area, like Broca's area, other than a module.

As far I can see, emotions are neurotransmitters like beta-endorphin, dopamine, serotonin, oxytocin and many more. I believe the main cause of mental illness are the differing ratios of these substances.

Take Anders Breivik, how many of you know he was taking steroids?

Most of the emotions ensue from the more ancient parts of our brain, Google 'Phineas Gage' for insight.

So we have primal drives that are mediated by our frontal cortex and before we all start to judge Fred West, understand he was in a motorcycle accident, where he suffered serious brain trauma, so the terrible things he did, might not have been caused by Satan, but by brain injury.

To any of you that get depressed, it helps to eat the right things and in the right amounts, over the years I have discovered a little bit of dark chocolate a day seems to help.

If I'm right that neurotransmitters are the basis of emotion, then the precursors to neurotransmitters are in what we eat.
Last edited by PeterTurland on Mon May 21, 2012 11:06 pm, edited 3 times in total.

Ian Stephens
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Re: CHESS PLAYING AND MENTAL HEALTH

Post by Ian Stephens » Mon May 21, 2012 10:18 pm

This thread reminds me of the time back in 2008 when I faced a medical panel, which after my treatment and recovery from the "Big C" declared me physically fit, the Doctor on the panel asked if I had any mental problems? I told him "Not really,I am just as crazy as everybody else" which got a laugh! :lol:
Ex-President of Liverpool Chess Club, now mere Tournament Controller and Chief bottle washer.

Justin Hadi

Re: CHESS PLAYING AND MENTAL HEALTH

Post by Justin Hadi » Mon May 21, 2012 11:25 pm

Nice post Peter,

It would appear Plato would not be a fan of chess. There are philosophies where logic guides emotion, for example Stoicism and Cynicism, where the philosophy dictates how you should feel/live (unless I've misunderstood). Also religious philosophies are similar, eg the ten commandments in Judeo-Christian philosophy. But it seems Plato had it right (to me at least).