Background to the proposal:

Mental health professionals are continually urged to find new ways to reach their clients. We must seek to connect with clients within their own unique culture and a current growing culture is individuals who identify as geeks and gamers. Geeks and gamers span all dimensions of sex, age, race, social class, physical disability, sexual orientation, and experience. However, these widely diverse individuals are unified into a cultural community that is steadily growing throughout the world. These individuals are joined together by their love of video games, comic books, fantasy, board games, card games, role playing games, and/or science fiction. They may further divide themselves within this culture into sub groups (i.e. FPS gamers or Magic fans) but they still have common characteristics, collective strengths, and inherent needs. Professionals in the mental health field are called to be responsive to the needs of their clients and community. Counselors can take advantage of the meanings and resiliency of the geek and gamer culture to establish a therapeutic alliance, to develop treatment interventions, and to help these individuals achieve a state of wellness.

Goal of the proposal:

There are some professionals already tailoring their practice to connect and design interventions for the unique needs of their geek and gamer clients. The current proposal is to connect these professionals and individuals who seek to learn more about how to support this growing group through an interest division of the ACA and ultimately through the development of a non-profit association to research, provide services, and promote this specialized mental health treatment.

Action To Be Taken:

In order to develop an interest division, we need signatures of current ACA members to show interest in this specialization.

To show your support and to become a member, please provide your name, email address, and current ACA member number which will be forwarded to the ACA.

Please direct any questions to Megan Blink atmvblink@hotmail.com or Stephen Kuniak at stephen.kuniak@gmail.com

Thank you for your support of this growing interest division within the American Counseling Association.