Relative to Korea and China ...

I've seen a few people talking about it. What I wonder is how it affects your play/interest/thoughts about the game.

I get pessimistic about my play, when I look over my games all I can see are the errors. I lose at least a stone in ability I think, though this could be me being negative again? I get anxious about playing and "looking bad" even though really at my level this will happen regardless! Oh and I play very little and I think I'd completely lose interest in the game for a while if I didn't fight this.


I'm curious because I'm nosey but also I believe in fighting stigma by being open about this kind of stuff, not that communities like these are very prejudiced against it or anything. Also, how do you tackle the effect depression has on your game and your life in general? Do you continue to chip away at the game be it through tsumego or whatever or do you put it aside until you feel better again? I'm also curious about general slumps people have, not just clinical depression! I'm also obviously talking about mild depressions here/lead ups to more serious depressions rather than more serious hospitilisation levels of depression where just eating is going to be a challenge never mind playing go!

The question (which I know you didn't explicitly ask), "Does go cause depression?" is similar to: "Do video games cause violence?" My answer is: No, but if that bad tendency already exists in someone's personality, then the game has the potential to nurture that tendency.

Got any figures to substantiate this? I wasn't aware of this at all.

Personally, I feel that the number of people who kill themselves is lower than it ought to be.

No, like I said, this is a hypothesis, it doesn't require facts & figures

And I'll say again, I don't believe that go causes depression.

However, I see go and other similar games being attractive to people who are having difficulty interacting with the world around them. It's an abstraction, losses are okay. Failure is temporary.

I would suspect, for example, that people who are depressed are more likely to play go (Which they can do from indoors), than they are to play volleyball.

I generated the hypothesis from this idea that there is a selection bias toward abstract activities which allow people to avoid social interaction.

Again, that does not imply that people who play go are depressed. Rather that go will have a greater pull for people who are depressed.

EDIT: And let me add that I believe this is culture-specific. I do not think this hypothesis applies to countries, like Japan, where the game is played by a different demographic.

I think it applies to countries like the US, where clubs fostering interaction are less common.

I've seen a few people talking about it. What I wonder is how it affects your play/interest/thoughts about the game.

I get pessimistic about my play, when I look over my games all I can see are the errors. I lose at least a stone in ability I think, though this could be me being negative again? I get anxious about playing and "looking bad" even though really at my level this will happen regardless! Oh and I play very little and I think I'd completely lose interest in the game for a while if I didn't fight this.


I'm curious because I'm nosey but also I believe in fighting stigma by being open about this kind of stuff, not that communities like these are very prejudiced against it or anything. Also, how do you tackle the effect depression has on your game and your life in general? Do you continue to chip away at the game be it through tsumego or whatever or do you put it aside until you feel better again? I'm also curious about general slumps people have, not just clinical depression! I'm also obviously talking about mild depressions here/lead ups to more serious depressions rather than more serious hospitilisation levels of depression where just eating is going to be a challenge never mind playing go!

Gifted children are often the products of emotional abuse by a narcissistic parent. However, if the child's great need for admiration is not met, for his/her looks, intelligence or achievements, he/she falls into severe depression. Miller says one can only be free from depression "when self-esteem is based on the authenticity of one's own feelings and not on the possession of certain qualities."

I think there are two aspects of Go that could easily relate to depression.
1. People who play go entirely on the internet.
2. (For some people) Spending a huge amount of time with Go, and regretting it later.

For #1, I think this is pretty straightforward. Go is a game, and games include a social element. This social element while not impossible is difficult to replicate on the internet.

Also, I remember years ago when I visited Japan for the first time and played at a number of local Go clubs. It was difficult to play with the members of the club for any long period of time since we could not communicate.

I had a completely different experience when I returned a few years later with enough Japanese to communicate with ease. The social experience is a huge part of Go.

For #2, I can still remember a story told by an older man at our local go club. He loved Go and was at our club many times per week. He claimed that he really felt alive when he was playing and around Go players. He would often tell the same stories - one was of a time when he was supposed to pick up the president of some company at the airport and happened upon two people battling it out in the airport lobby. He quickly became caught up in the game and ended up arriving late to pick up the arriving CEO. It caused him some professional damage and often joked about how stupid the whole thing was and how he wasted so much of his life sitting in front of a board covered with black and white pieces.

Which brings us to a tangent in the conversation.
Most of us believe that time spent practicing and playing Go is time well spent.
How do you feel about the fact there are a large number of people out there who don't respect time spent on mental pursuits like Go? There is a depressingly large number of people in this world (American, European, Japanese...) who believe that Go is just a game and that time spent studying it would be better spent doing something else.

But as a counter point as someone who suffers from depression and plays go, one of the things I love about the game is the social interaction that surrounds it. Anecdotal but if I wanted to avoid human contact I'd go back to playing Civilisation obsessively or something.

Playing badly (or such) causing depression sounds fatuous to me and probably makes me more annoyed than it should. I'd bet that being especially depressed makes you likely to eg. lose badly, not that losing badly causes the depression. I really hate fake medicine book peddlers who feed on correlation/causality confusion (amoung lies).

Have you tried playing against bots or a decent Go software program to hone up your skills a bit before jumping back into KGS? Or perhaps trying a smaller and less overwhelming online venue than KGS, such as Go Shrine? (That's where I play almost all my online games against people; if I'm going to play software I prefer to just play against MFG12 or GnuGo on my laptop.)