Profs & Pints Baltimore: Role-Playing Games and Mental Health

Profs and Pints Baltimore presents: “Role-Playing Games and Mental Health,” with William Nation, adjunct professor of psychology at Texas Woman's University and staff psychologist at Johns Hopkins University.

Role-playing games like Dungeons & Dragons used to be the stuff of basement nerd culture. Fast forward a few decades from their 1970s origins and now they’re everywhere, from big-budget movies and television shows to corporate team-building exercises. 

Here’s the wild part: Beyond being fun, these games actually are helping people’s mental health in real and measurable ways.

Learn about the fascinating history of role-playing games and their emergence as a tool for mental-health professionals with William Nation, who has spent years using tabletop games in therapeutic settings and educating others how to do so.

He’ll take us through time from the 1980s, when the growing popularity of such games strangely inspired fears that they were a gateway to Satanism, to the…