Keene State College’s Wellness Center, located in the Elliot Center, is running a new therapy program based on the tabletop role-playing game “Dungeons & Dragons” for the spring semester.
“Dungeons and Therapy” is a group therapy session that meets every Monday from 4-5:30 p.m., according to posters found across campus.
Assistant Director for Counseling Beth Aronson described Dungeons and Therapy as a space where players build a character with traits they would like to have. Players who successfully play their characters in ways that meet their therapeutic goals are rewarded with in-game advancement and bonuses such as advantage on dice rolls.
Players also report at the beginning of each session when they have made progress towards those therapeutic goals in their real lives, Aronson said.
“It’s a way for people to do anything from trying to be out with the gender identity that they are … interested in making more public or it could be somebody working on just being more socially engaged,” Aronson said.
Aronson said the Wellness Center staff tries to keep therapy groups at a low number of participants so every person who joins has the chance to speak and get the most out of their experience. She said the staff tries to roll out a number of therapy groups at the beginning of each semester and that having a table at the Office of Student Involvement’s Winter Celebration on Friday, Jan. 26 helped to get word out about the center to students.
The turnout for Dungeons and Therapy has been big enough that the groups are nearly at capacity, which may lead to a split of the group into two groups running two games, with counselor Michael Evans running one game and Aronson running the other. Aronson said she has been doing research to catch up on the most current and popular versions of the game to make sure she can successfully run the games.
The idea to run a Dungeons & Dragons-themed therapy group came from one of the Wellness Center’s intern therapists from Antioch University, according to Aronson.
“He was the first one who really said, ‘Let’s do this here,’” Aronson said. “I had actually gone to a workshop about it and a practice game with somebody who had used it in a college campus setting and I read about it a bit, but he was the one who had the guts to actually try it.”
Counseling and therapy have become increasingly important and popular resources on college campuses in recent years, according to a 2022 article by Zara Abrams for the American Psychological Association. Abrams reported that over 60% of college students experienced at least one mental health issue during the 2020-2021 school year.
Dungeons & Dragons has also grown in popularity recently, with numbers released in 2020 by Wizards of the Coast, the game’s publishing company, reporting over 50 million players, according to a Game Rant article by Cameron Corliss.
Aronson said the Wellness Center staff ran a practice game of Dungeons & Dragons before the start of the spring semester to test the concept. Now they play the game together casually sometimes.
Charlotte King can be contacted at
cking@kscequinox.com
