My reply that elucidated on this got admin-vanished, but I want to establish that I do often like very dark subject matter, even stuff that digs into my triggers, as long as it’s done in an informed way with a lot of care and, if not a creator’s personal experience, thorough research into personal accounts. Stories that treat the experience, and the people who have lived it, with the proper thematic respect and gravitas (even when the descriptions are lurid and seemingly gratuitous) are really cathartic for me, whereas things which treat the experience as warm and cozy and positive can leave me feeling uncomfortable and cold.
For an example of the former, I want to bass boost Bluebeard’s Bride, a horror TTRPG based off the old folktale about a blue-bearded man whose wives have all mysteriously gone missing. This game has heavy content warnings regarding such things as: self harm, gaslighting, psychological manipulation, religious abuse, forced abortions, forced pregnancy, torture, suicide, slutshaming, victim blaming, murder, domestic violence, body horror, gore, and sexual assault up to and including rape. Most of the time, the players are the victim of this violence, and some of the time they are the perpetrator. While some of this content can be opted-out of when playing, to play it at all means you’re agreeing to experience the premise, centered around lack of agency and feminine horror.
Why play or run such a horrible, gruesome game? To either learn, through heightened and fanastical depiction of trauma, the ways that the world traumatizes women (and femininity in general) (see Kastel’s Rosebush article about making trauma legible)-- Or to sit with other people in your gaming group, look them in the eye, and via the terror say “I see you. I went through it too.”
I have recommended Bluebeard’s Bride to many, MANY people of various genders who are fans of horror. All of the ones who I’ve gotten the pleasure to sit down and run the game for, even (and perhaps especially) the ones who have been victims of much of the content listed above, have found the game extremely upsetting and extremely worthwhile. But of course, those who wouldn’t find it worthwhile would never sit down and play it in the first place.
Also of note, I eagerly ran the insane asylum alternate setting of Bluebeard’s Bride, where the player character is a woman who voluntarily (“voluntarily”) admits herself into the grippy socks box, with the head of the psych ward being “Doctor Bluebeard”. The creepiest scenes were drawing on real experiences of nonconsensual violence in mental institutions; personal accounts from articles and papers or accounts of my own.
I say all this to emphasize that I do like this content and I’m not opposed to tackling topics of mental health, even the trauma and setting that Slouching Toward Bedlam is trying to depict. You just gotta do it with more care.