Ellie_D

Sorry if that was directed towards Ben and Lily, but it's such a good question, I couldn't resist. In my science writing days, I actually looked into some of the factors contributing to resilience. Genes are definitely one, although it's not a simple matter of good genes vs bad genes. There's some compelling research that genes influence your sensitivity to the environment - so if you grow up in a harsh family climate and have sensitive genes, you are more prone to struggling with mental health if you hit rough road. The interesting bit is that there's some evidence that if you take those same sensitive genes but you also have a nurturing family environment, that could actually create a sort of protection against mental trouble. In a way, genes amplify the environment. David Dobbs wrote a fascinating article on the topic.

It's funny, I approach this question by trying first to get to the root of the problem and then working backwards to the solution. Here are some articles that may be interesting for you as you begin to unpack the issue:

• The Science of Success - Two gene types (Orchids and Dandelions) and their implications for mental health

• The social lefe of genes - How our environment gets under the skin and impacts our biology

• Rejection kills - An article I wrote about how rejection has far more serious implications than we think it does

• Cradled by therapy - How the therapy relationship may work to "correct" suboptimal parenting

All of these articles have other resources that will point you to research across neuroscience, economics, biology, psychology, etc. Hope that helps!

Ha, that's true! I think it helped us a lot, actually, because it meant we didn't have all this pre-conceived knowledge about what games are and aren't, what you should and shouldn't do, etc. So we could try new things that would probably sound crazy or heretic to someone who has learned a particular framework and can't shake it off to see things from a new angle. That said, Hazel and I both had experience with writing and we knew how stories worked, and this turned out to be really useful when we were designing Betwixt. In fact, the first challenge we set ourselves was to see if we can come up with a story that could engage even hardcore players on its own, without any bells and whistles, and we put this on Facebook Messenger. Then we got 50 gamers from Reddit to try it out and it was because of their positive feedback that we decided to keep going.

I think it's a combination of those. One's early environment seems especially important - and it's not just family environment but our social surroundings, too. Rising inequality, for example, has been shown to contribute to a large number of mental health problems. There's some compelling evidence that social exclusion, in fact, gets under the skin, so to say, leading to dangerously high levels of inflammation in the body. And I think that nowadays can be easier to feel excluded, less than and alone because social media constantly bombards us with images of others achieving more than us or having a much better time. Obviously, it's so much more complex but these are some of the interesting factors I've been thinking about. What do you think?

I've personally struggled with depression in the form of lack of meaning and purpose. I know exactly what you mean by things being "grey, cold and numb". When I'm in that state, I do whatever I need to do to cling on and keep going, and sometimes that has meant leaving a job, spending a month in the mountains to get unstuck inside my own mind, or accepting that the life that brings me joy and curiosity may not be the life that brings me recognition or prestige, and that's okay. When I find something - and it could be the tiniest thing - that keeps me engaged in the world, I hold on to that fiercely because in the end the goal that trumps all other goals is to stay alive.