Siranui said:

My comment was specifically relevant to the issue at hand, that with some people the threat of punishment is demonstrably not a successful deterant because of non-jerk biological factors which do effect behaviour and has possible relevance to this and definately to many other cases of problem player behaviour. I was leaving aside the subject of the general effectiveness of threats of punishment over the rest of the population as a system of justice which is a topic that could easilly derail the main conversation. I'm sorry that i failed to make the distinction between the two clear and i fear a few of my key words were eaten by whatever forum gremlin seems to be afflicting posting here, regardless my sincere apologies for seeming to try and stifle debate rather than trying to avoid going off-topic.

As for Australia's convict heritage, probably no moreso than America, England's previous penal colony as for me no convict ancestry to my knowledge, a pirate queen and the captain of an infamous ghost ship i do have though.

Fair enough, but I don't really think the penal system is relevant when discussing punishment and it's effectiveness. The threat of prison doesn't always work as a deterrent to curb behaviour because it's just that: A threat. A risk, not a certainty. Criminals tend to get away with their crimes on a regular basis and for a number of years prior to arrest. And then the trial takes ages, which further distances the association of punishment from the crime. And then sentencing is far from a slam-dunk. Career criminals are even less deterred because they know that crime *does* pay, and that you're 'unlucky' to get caught. That's not really punishment, because the positive reinforcement (profiting from crime) is the more likely outcome. It would be relevant if EVERY time the criminal committed a crime they went to jail.

[ironically, the threat of jail works best on those of us who are far-removed from criminality, who think that prison is a terrible place and that if we commit a crime we're likely to get caught. It might not stop career criminals from anything, but it works well on generally law-abiding people]

Whereas if you rub a puppy's nose in poo *every* time it does it in the kitchen, it soon gets the idea. Pet owners, Sergeant Majors and parents the world over will verify that punishment works pretty well. It's just that punishment needs to be the most likely outcome of crime/sin/being a jerk, instead of a rare one.

Which means that you do have to pull people up for being jerks on a regular basis, rather than once a session. If getting pulled up on bad behaviour is a rare event, it's not instilling discipline: It's doing the opposite.

That's not to say that positive reinforcement doesn't have a place at the gaming table too. However, rewarding a jerk for managing an hour of decent behaviour will annoy everyone else who manages four hours straight for no special-snowflake reward. So instead of motivating the jerk by handing out candy, it can often pay for them to see it handed out to other people who are 'doing real good' when they're being a jerk. Make sure when handing out rewards you say WHY, or it will seem unfair. 'Here's 50XP for good roleplay and helping the narrative' or 'Here's a shiny medal for being a valuable member of the team' is infinitely more valuable than 'Everyone except Bob Jerk-off can level', because that seems 'unfair' to the player.

The idea of shared punishment is good. Have the PC's antics get everyone fatigue detail. Pretty soon they'll be dealing with the matter 'in-house' and the GM won't need to deal with it. Or just stop running the game while the player is being a jerk, and pick up a paperback. After a couple of minutes they other players will want to strangle him.

As a character-note, jerks and loud-mouths don't last long in military institutions. Either they drop out, or it gets beaten out of them real quick; either by whoever is in charge, or whoever is supposed to be trusting the mouthy jerk who never listens with their life and who doesn't want to loose it because of some mouthy jerk who doesn't listen!

I'd threaten to tape the session and post it on YouTube.

Seriously though, rewarding bad behavior is never a good thing. Ask if he is really interested in playing the game or is just interested in hanging out with his friends. If its the former let him know that reading up on some of the game fluff (there is a lot out there cyber and print) would help him understand his characer better. If its the latter, then tell him he can attend the game and listen in, but he's not playing in the game because he is distracting to the players and you as the GM. I bet a few weeks of this and he would be ready to play on a more 'normal' basis.

Sorry for this post getting a bit long.

As 80% of prisoners are mentally ill and mental illnesses effect behaviour and 70% of them have an acquired brain injury which specifically impacts the parts of the brain involved in impulse-control then at best it's only 20% of prisoners who have no influence on their decision making capacity. Considering that the aquired brain injury prisoners more often are the violent criminals with high re-offence rates and many of those gained their brain injury from sport we might be better able to reduce the jail population with greater regulations on school sports than with any threat of imprisonment. Of course the discoveries involving neuroplasticity and the rewiring of the brain may mean that these injuries may be able to healed before the patient punches someone in the head then stands over their prone form wondering why they did so.

To complicate matters around 1 in 30 people are psychopaths disabled in the natural instinctive capacity for empathy and teaching them to form an intellectual empathy is not easy, but is possible especially if diagnosed early. It doesn't help though that they rather than being a significant part of the prison population are instead most often found as CEOs with 1 in 3 CEOs tested turning out to be psychopaths!

Now the difficulty is addressing both populations human rights and providing for the human rights of the rest of the populace. Psychopaths, especially the colloquially termed 'powerpaths', unless they have overcome their empathy disability will do what ever suits them regardless of the impact on others so long as they feel they can get away with it unless they realise that a system founded on reciprocal ethics is an arrangement that is in their best interests also. Meanwhile the majority of those incarcerated are not logically responsible for their actions and are suffering from a disability in impulse-control and no amount of punishment will repair their brain damage, only quality rehabilitation will do that and to do so on an effective societal level this would require mass-screening and substantial health service focus on rehabilitation, though the reduced cost in both the expense of large prison populations as well as the reduced cost to society caused by stopping much of the crime before it is committed should cover that.

When it comes to relating this to the game the very high likelihood that some problem players will have some kind of circumstance impacting on their behaviour needs to be taken into account. Psychopaths in game groups aren't the same kind of problem as is being discussed here so while they are an important part of understanding the power-force-influence dynamic of systems of enforcement and justice solutions for dealing with psychopaths aren't going to help much in these kinds of cases.

It is often overly simplistic to suggest punishment is effective in parenting, as authoratative discipline often instills a might-is-right perspective in children which leads to the bullying of other children as a way to feel better about having to submit to the power of an authoratative parent whereas if the child understands the reasons behind the rules they are far less likely to disobey them (concuring with the value of your WHY point in player rewards) . Much of the bullying problems in schools at the moment comes from a domino effect where some of the victims of abuse or authoratative parents then pass along the lesson they have learned from the example of the parents by inflicting harm on other children some of whom then do the same to others etc. Again this may relate to in-game behaviour. In my 22 years of roleplaying i have seen very often how a players behaviour relates to concurrent life-circumstance for a variety of reasons.

Assuming that a player is in their late teens or older the chances are that plenty of people have tried to curb any problem behaviour already, they will have been shaped by authorities uses of power, by peer pressure or resistence to peer pressure. They will have developed coping mechanisms in response to this, chances are they will have been exposed to traumatic bullying and developed defencive trigger-behaviours which will activate in response to similar techniques. Attempts to change behaviour based on the techniques which didnt work at school and didnt work in childhood probably wont work now and the likelihood that their enduring problems stemmed from those techniques is high. And while the military may afford to have a disposable system that weeds out people who aren't suited to it the rest of society cannot afford to do so (besides which its a betrayal of the social contract which is an intrinsic part of every persons rights and responsibilities to the rights of others) and more importantly its a poor friend who merely pushes out or abandons those in need who may have a prfound need for understanding and friendship. Especially if mental illness is involved as that 'tough love' treatment could be what sends someone whose acting out stems from a serious struggle over the edge to self harm or suicide.

As for players getting upset because the problem player is getting some extra attention in order to guide them towards catching up in behaviour skills (not rewarding bad behaviour but rewarding progress away from bad behaviour towards good behaviour).. well i see no difference than with people who get upset cause a wheelchair access ramp is put in for people in wheelchairs to have the same access as others. The "why don't i get a ramp or a closer parking space" whine of the priviliged with no sense of perspective (ok it may be getting a bit academic mentioning philosophers at this point but John Rawls Veil of Ignorance test is a great excercise for exploriong some of these ideas).

As i said I've been GMing for about 22 years, maybe 23 actually. I've tried all manner of ways to deal with all manner of problem players. And in the long-term threats of punishment or getting players to leave games still left people who had problems, just with some more reinforcement of abandonment issues or hurt feelings, damaged friendships etc. Whereas careful guidance has had people in my games improve not just in the game but many aspects of their lives where the cause of the problem was related. Heck i've seen rpg's significantly help peoples lives! (particularly several survivors of childhood abuse who indeed started out as problem players).

Battybattybats said:

I don't disagree that many countries do a piss poor job of handling the mentally ill population, I'd be interested to see where you got your statistics here as I'm not certain the represent global numbers...though it also depends on how liberally you apply the term/diagnosis 'mentaly ill'...

Battybattybats said:

Cheers to you for taking in our unwashed masses, and I actually mean that.

Not all of the GMs out there are, or care to be, psych majors fixing the ills of all of the folks that cross upon our gaming tables. I would even suggest that many are not equipped or capable of providing what is essentially psycological care. Us 'regular' folk can only do the best we can with what we have to work with, and be understanding of our friends. But sometimes a jerk is a jerk, and they need to buck up and take some responsibility. Other times, some people just don't mix well with certain activities, and gaming may be one of them- just because you stop gaming with a person doesn't mean you're no longer their friend. I have friends that I don't play sports with because they become hyper agressive when they play, I have friends I don't see movies with because they talk the whole friggin time, but I still engage in other activities with those people.

As Siranui says " If someone is mentally ill and a friend, I'd know about it and compensate. Nobody here is saying 'kick people who have Aspergers because they're jerks'."

I've found that it works best to punish the character, not the player. if he keeps getting himself killed or demoted for stupid reasons, then hell eventually change or stop playing.

Charmander said:

The numbers come from discussions on ABC Radio National (Australian Broadcasting Corporation, a government owned national tv and radio broadcaster) on a series of programs particularly All In The Mind the weekly psychology discussion program and others especially with the official Australian Of The Year last year being a mental health campaigner which raised the issue of mental health and suicide on a national level, an issue thats still a significant political issue here with a high-profile resignation over the federal governments failure to enact promises about improved mental health care. I myself have been involved in some aspects of this issue in Australia having attended the New South Wales State Parliamentary Forum on Homophobic Bullying in Schools and two of the Australian Human Rights Commission's community consultations last year of which youth mental health outcomes and suicide were a significant part of the subject.

Statistically most 'jerks' here at least are people with problems who need friends and understanding. That's definately been my experience. With 1 in 5 Australians suffering ill mental health at some point in their lives its something which touches most families and social groups which our nation is starting to acknowledge and deal with. Most people with ill mental health don't tell their friends or families and many don't seek treatment especially in rural areas where the suicide rate amongst youth and farmers reached a critical level that the government launched a depression awareness campaign and added some mental health services to the national medical services through GPs. Sure things may differ nation to nation, the USA has far more of their population imprisoned and Japan has a higher rate of suicide but whether these are all parts of the same problem would require a decent sized comparative study but i'd expect that it's likely so.

I'm not suggesting people get a degree and counsel their friends and players. I'm just suggesting people try carrot rather than stick for a variety of reasons. Though it couldn't hurt to pass on a few links for helping friends and family who may have depression or anxiety issues just in case anyone here might find it useful

http://www.youthbeyondblue.com/factsheets-and-info/fact-sheet-6-helping-a-friend-with-depression-or-anxiety/

http://www.beyondblue.org.au/index.aspx?link_id=59.536

Battybattybats said:

Whoa. Citation, please? Those figures for psychopathic spectrum disorders are FAR higher than I've seen recorded elsewhere. Either Australia has more psychopaths than everywhere else, or there's a problem with the figures. The figures on CEOs are also rather whack and I'd like to see some citation there, too. It's true that 'successful psychopaths' often do well in business, but the truth is rather over-hyped. Psychopaths have a lot of traits that can make them successful in business, but the typical psychopath will not be able to keep matters in order and their ambitions in check for long enough in one place to be a success there. Psychopaths -simply put- tend not to stay in one place -professionally or socially- for too long. Yes: Some psychopaths are great in business, just as tons of elite athletes have OCD, but the figure isn't anywhere near 1-in-3.

Additional the '1-in-5 affected by mental illness in their lives' is a real weasel statistic that needs sourcing too. I'd be 'affected by' mental illness if any one of my immediate family was mentally ill, or if I was the victim of crime perpetrated by someone mentally ill. That's a massively wide net and an essentially completely meaningless statistic.

That aside; as a GM it's not really my job to permanently change the behaviour of friends who turn up to my games, nor to teach them to be better people. If someone is a jerk and spoiling the game for me and other people, I'll tell them so. If I think that there are deeper mental issues in-play and they've never mentioned anything to me, then it's not my business to involve myself, and the sooner they get the message that such behaviour is not ok and try to do something about it, the better for everyone.

Battybattybats said:

Errr... not really. You cannot compare 'depression' in Japan with 'depression' in Western nations because they are two seperate things, with seperate symptoms, causes, et al. Mental illness is cultural.

Battybattybats said:

Oh, popular media. A great place for statistics. Seriously: Those figures are way higher than they should be. Have a look at more typical world-wide figures from academic sources and you'll see that they've been horrifically inflated.

ABC radio national is hardly 'popular' media as such, it's still considered fairly serious journalism if such a thing still exists anywhere, and the programs i refer to such as All In The Mind and The Health Report and The Science Show involve interviews with authorities and researchers on a regular basis.

The psychopath/powerpath numbers came not just from media reports but also friends of mine who studying psychology at the time (At the University of New England) and who discussed with me at length the key questions in the test which garnered those results and various implications of the claims.

The 1 in 5 Australians suffer mental ill health sometime in their lives has been used by the previous years Australian Of The Year, by State and Federal Government, by the Beyond Blue organisation, by my own GP, is on the rural suicide-prevention leaflet where i pay my rent.. it's a very widely used stat. If it's bunkum then that could be politically quite significant.

I do concede that original sources are indeed always better evidence, however general depression isn't my area of focus so i don't have the original sources, as my focus is more specifically with GLBTI human rights issues (where LaTrobe university has a series of important studies on GLBTI youth suicide and other mental health outcomes such as the Writing Themselves In 3 study).

Regarding culture and mental illness, to suggest they are utterly unrelated is quite an interesting claim, especially as neurology is eroding away the somewhat subjective and arbitrary nature of psychology with more hard-science (such as the studies finding neurological anatomical variations, such as in the Lymbic Nucleus, in the brains of Transgender people that more closely match their self-identified gender than the birth-assignment one they were raised in.) so i would expect that culture may profoundly influence the expression of a mental illness but the causation is likely to be common and if not that could have some very interesting implications.

As for what's a GMs job, well that would send us to the field of ethics, which could be a very fascinating discussion.

Where one games with friends one has additional obligations of friendship, where one GMs in a competition, professional or organised hobby situation then there's a stronger obligation of duty. As a friend of someone who shows signs of possible ill mental health there are several possible arguments why you would have obligations to 'involve yourself' not as an intrusive busybody but to create a space for them to talk and have someone to listen to and to help counter societal phobioas against talking about, admitiing or seeking help for ill mental health. As societal animals we all do also have a degree of obligation to all other members of the society, the mutual obligation that includes both respect for one anothers full equal human rights, the mutually supporting safety net such as the caring for the young and the elderly from which we all have benefited and may one day need to rely upon again. I would suggest, as the beginning of the ethics portion of the discussion, that there would indeed be an obligation to help someone playing in your game who you suspected may suffer from unrecognised or undiagnosed ill mental health.

Then there's the matter of what will be effective, and again i restate the point that if threats of punishment or social ostracism haven't worked in the persons life up to this point to curb any problem behaviour then a different tactic is likely to be more effective.

Also let me thank you for this engaging and interesting conversation

I'd really recommend looking into your figures still. Although I'm not in a position to debate the ones on incarcerated Australians, the figure for psychopathy is very suspect indeed, to the point where it actively clashes with papers that I read in recent years. And given the choice between a figure given in media and one in published academic circles, I'm going to have to press for at least a measure of cynicism about the media-presented figure.

In my own country a figure of 1-in-10 suffering mental health issues is commonly cited. Is your country twice as mentally ill as mine? Or do we have two -at best- questionable figures that are so broad in their scope and vague as to be of little use. How was the figure derived? Certainly; if I was to attend a GP in the wake of a death in the family, redundancy, or two weeks of straight drinking I would almost certainly fit the criteria for clinical depression. Am I actually mentally ill? No, but I would be recorded as such and would be one of those 'affected in their lives' with the omission of the words 'by strict clinical diagnosis, for about a week'. In fact, this very thing once happened to me during a (badly timed!) annual medical, resulting in the GP laughably attempting to 'diagnose' me with depression based on a 5 minute conversation [GPs should really not be placed in the position where they diagnose mental illness; for statistical purposes, or any other]! In other words: Having direct experience of how a widely cited government statistic was gathered in my own country, I lack any faith in it.

Widespread and vague statistics on the state of mental health of a nation aren't really very useful for anything except shock-PR purposes. That's great for getting attention for causes, but it's poor statistics. And we all know that the wider a statistic is used, the more likely it's been filtered fifteen times and seldom resembles its original format. If statistics are going to be cited, they need a source and a less vague criteria, or they muddy matters, rather than clarify them.

Mental illness is very varied by culture. Some aspects are the same, and some things pretty universal, but that's not the whole story, and depression is a case in point. Western medicine looks at the matter through Western eyes and attributes mental illness in Western ways, but it's wrong to do so. What is depression to us exists with very different symptoms and as very different things in other countries. GSK had to pretty much 'sell' depression to Japan in order to start selling anti-depressants there. I'd recommend looking into the matter more. A trite but graphic example that's fairly local to you would be the old Malaysian 'running amok'. Another example would be Anorexia Nervosa: A very Western issue, which has spread to other cultures as our own cultures have 'infected' them.

***

Back to the ethics of friendship.... erm... worth another post...

No worries; as you say.

Actually i too have been briefly missdiagnosed briefly with mental illness, what i actually had (and still have alas) was chronic fatigue syndrome but back in the 90s i had to go through several doctors before i got a rational diagnosis because of the bias there once was about it. "I'd say you had chronic fatigue syndrome, if i believed it existed" were the words of one doctor!

Even if the general depression figures given are way off, being transgender myself (something incorrectly still classed as mental illness in the DSM despite the biological discoveries, even genetic discoveries) and having a transgender partner (who i must add is so utterly wonderful as to have covered half the cost of my deathwatch collectors edition i recently ordered!) and a number of friends who are GLBTI and living in a rural area where suicide rates have been high for years (the drought certainly exacerbated that too as lots of generational farms went to the wall) i'm well aware of the significant number of people left fragile by social ostracism, bullying and discrimination and the ways some of them react to that. The Transgender attempted suicide stats of the Australian state of Queensland i can cite as a friend of mine Linda Petrie collected them. 37.7% is the attempted suicide rate, the LaTrobe University study Writing Themselves In 3 and Tranznation being important published studies i can cite). I've seen how in many cases problematic behaviour has stemmed from peoples past traumatic experiences. I've even seen examples of outright bigotry stemming from internalised issues (sexist racist homophobe who turned out to be gay and self-acceptance ended all the bigoted behaviour). And so i still support the carrot/guidance tactic over the stick tactic as the better way to deal with a problem player.

As for your examples of culturally situated mental illnesses that shows that the apparent symptoms vary culturally and io know there's lots of other examples like Jerusalem Syndrome and more. But that doesn't tell us whether the culture simply influences how the illness is experienced and expressed rather than whether the causes differ.