Senua’s psychosis in virtual reality: effects on mental health stigma

Oliver Mason and Megan Westhead

Behaviour and Information Technology, 2025, vol. 44, issue 10, 2134-2139

Abstract: Schizophrenia is probably the most stigmatised of all mental health conditions and many interventions have attempted to reduce this. This study examined how playing a serious virtual reality game might address stigmatised attitudes about severe mental illness, and schizophrenia in particular. The game chosen, Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice, contains a first-person experience of voice-hearing and other psychotic symptoms. We hypothesised that gameplay would increase Empathy, reduce Desire for social distance and improve attitudes to schizophrenia using measures adapted from prior work. We also measured participants’ beliefs about the voices heard by the protagonist, Senua, using the Beliefs about Voices Questionnaire-revised to compare to published data from both clinical and non-clinical voice hearers. 37 participants completed stigma measures both before and after experiencing 20 minutes of the game. Attitudes about schizophrenia significantly improved following the game, but empathy and desire for social distance did not. Results partially support the role that serious games can play in addressing mental health stigma. Overall, Senua’s voices were experienced very similarly to those of clinical voice hearers supporting the clinical veracity of the game depiction of psychosis.

Date: 2025
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/0144929X.2023.2265516 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:taf:tbitxx:v:44:y:2025:i:10:p:2134-2139

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/tbit20

DOI: 10.1080/0144929X.2023.2265516

Access Statistics for this article

Behaviour and Information Technology is currently edited by Dr Panos P Markopoulos

More articles in Behaviour and Information Technology from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().