Cloud9 Announce Mental Wellness Initiative
May 15, 2020
Esports organization Cloud9 and health care company Kaiser Permanente have announced a new initiative focused on increasing awareness about mental health.
The multiyear partnership, Presence of Mind, will aim to help Cloud9’s players work on their own mental health and leverage its large fan base to shed light on ways to address mental health and reduce stigma about the topic.
The initiative has three parts: providing mental health training to Cloud9 players, coaches and staff; airing a Twitch series focused on increasing awareness of mental health; and educating community moderators so they can facilitate positive discussions on mental health topics.
Cloud9’s League of Legends team will get the training first, with the League of Legends Academy team to follow at a later date. Cloud9 is one of the stalwarts of League of Legends’ Championship Series (LCS), and the players are “under tremendous pressure to succeed,” said Jack Etienne, Cloud9’s founder and CEO, in an interview with The Verge. “And we haven’t always had the tools that Kaiser is bringing to us to deal with it.”
Right now, the League of Legends team is in its offseason between the spring and summer seasons, called “splits” in the LCS. The plan is to educate team managers and coaches before the team begins practicing for the summer split and to implement the mental health work into the team’s match preparations during the season.
For the Twitch series, the two companies are using it as a way to share messages about mental health awareness and hopefully decrease stigma around mental health issues, said Don Mordecai, Kaiser Permanente’s national leader for mental health and wellness.
Esports influencers and Kaiser Permanente experts will connect on different episodes to talk about gaming and mental health, including topics such as coping during the COVID-19 pandemic and combating burnout.
The Presence of Mind initiative will target online community moderators to equip people who interact with the Cloud9 community, such as Twitch or Discord moderators, with appropriate messaging and language to be able to facilitate safe discussions about mental health issues with those communities. “Not only in Twitch, but also in Discord, we want to make sure that we’re providing safe places for people to spend their time,” said Etienne.
Beyond Sport is committed to advancing mental health through sport through the Stay in the Game Network – a collaboration of sport, healthcare and social change organizations using sport as a platform and catalyst to end stigmas and promote action on mental wellness.
The next Network meeting will take place during Beyond Sport Workshop Week, which will also feature a special session on esports.