Addiction to video games seems to be stirring a debate: a psychiatric disorder?
The Associated Press and the
Winston Salem Journal in North Carolina share this theory from professionals in regard to video games and addiction. I personally believe there is substance to this, and could very well be measured on the same scale along with computer addiction. There doesn't seem to be a age limit where it actually begins, but attacks all ages. However, this is focused directly with teenagers and younger children.
The telltale signs are ominous: teenagers holed up in their rooms, ignoring friends, family, even food and a shower, as grades fall and belligerence soars. The culprit is not alcohol or drugs. It is video games, which for certain children can be as powerfully addictive as heroin, some doctors say.
A leading council of the nation’s largest doctors’ group wants to have this behavior officially classified as a psychiatric disorder, to raise awareness and enable sufferers to get insurance coverage for treatment.
Wouldn't you agree that if coverage can be applied to video games addicts, that a study should be done for computer addicts, who, some have committed suicide for whatever reason just from becoming addicted to the Internet and whatever that scenario held there for them? There is a wider step outside of the box, than just looking at video games alone. Most go hand in hand.
Under no certain conditions am I taking this situation light, because I have a twelve year old son myself, who seems to want to be playing this more than he really should. I'm just saying that there are many addictions that can be added to the list. Perhaps we should use the term Technology addiction, that would cover it all.
Please take the time to read opinions and research below. :-)
In a report prepared for the American Medical Association’s annual policy meeting starting Saturday in Chicago, the council asks the group to lobby for the disorder to be included in a widely used manual on mental illness created and published by the American Psychiatric Association.
It probably will not happen without heated debate. Makers of video games scoff at the notion that their products can cause a psychiatric disorder. Even some mental-health experts say that labeling the habit a formal addiction is going too far.
Dr. James Scully, the psychiatric association’s medical director, said that the group will consider the AMA report in the long process of revising the diagnostic manual. The next edition will be completed in 2012.
As many as 90 percent of American youngsters play video games, and as many as 15 percent of them - more than 5 million children - may be addicted, according to data quoted in the AMA council’s report.
Joyce Protopapas of Frisco, Texas, said that her son, Michael, 17, was a video addict. Over nearly two years, video and Internet games transformed him from an outgoing, academically gifted teenager into a reclusive manipulator who failed two 10th-grade classes and spent several hours day and night playing a popular online video game called World of Warcraft.
“My father was an alcoholic ... and I saw exactly the same thing” in Michael, Protopapas said.
“We battled him until October of last year,” she said.
“We went to therapists; we tried taking the game away.
“He would threaten us physically. He would curse and call us every name imaginable,” she said. “It was as if he was possessed.”
When she suggested to therapists that Michael had a video-game addiction, “nobody was familiar with it,” she said. “They all pooh-poohed it.” Last fall, the family found a therapist who “told us he was addicted, period.” They sent Michael to a therapeutic boarding school, where he has spent the past six months - at a cost of $5,000 a month that insurance will not cover, his mother said.
A support group called On-Line Gamers Anonymous has numerous postings on its Web site from gamers needing help. Liz Woolley, of Harrisburg, Pa., created the site after her son, 21, fatally shot himself in 2001 while playing an online game that she says destroyed his life.
In a February posting, a 13-year-old identified only as Ian told of playing video games for nearly 12 hours straight, said he felt suicidal and wondered if he was addicted. “I think I need help,” the boy said.
Postings also come from adults, mostly men, who say that video-game addiction cost them jobs, family lives and self-esteem.
According to the report prepared by the AMA’s Council on Science and Public Health, based on a review of scientific literature, “dependence-like behaviors are more likely in children who start playing video games at younger ages.”
Overuse most often occurs with online role-playing games involving multiple players, the report says. Blizzard Entertainment’s teenager-rated, monster-killing World of Warcraft is among the most popular. A company spokesman declined to comment on whether the games can cause addiction.
A woman in the New Haven, Conn., area who bought the game for her 15-year-old son last year, says that he got hooked on it. “Now that I look back on it, it’s like I went out and bought him his first Jack Daniel’s,” said the woman, who did not want her name used to spare her son from ridicule.
Dr. Martin Wasserman, a pediatrician who heads the Maryland State Medical Society, said that the AMA proposal will help raise awareness, and called it “the right thing to do.”
But Michael Gallagher, the president of the Entertainment Software Association, said that the trade group sides with psychiatrists “who agree that this so-called ‘video-game addiction’ is a mental disorder.”
“The American Medical Association is making premature conclusions without the
benefit of complete and thorough data,” Gallagher said.
Dr. Karen Pierce, a psychiatrist at Chicago’s Children’s Memorial Hospital, said she sees at least two children a week who play video games excessively.
“I saw somebody this week who hasn’t been to bed, hasn’t showered ... because of video games,” Pierce said. She said she treats it as she would any addiction, and that creating a separate diagnosis is unnecessary.
Dr. Michael Brody, the head of a TV and media committee at the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, agreed.
Brody praised the AMA council for bringing attention to the problem, but said that excessive video-game playing could be a symptom for other things, such as depression or social anxieties that already have their own diagnoses.
