Video game addiction a disease?
— Lisa Pont has heard plenty of skepticism about video game addiction and whether it’s truly a medical condition that should be classified as a disease, something the World Health Organization plans to do in a couple of months.
“Some people think it trivializes other diseases. People think, ‘Oh my God, how can you get addicted to gaming? Just put (the controller) down,’ ” says Pont, a social worker at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health in Toronto.
“But I’ve been seeing people coming to CAMH for treatment for almost 10 years, so whether it was an official diagnosis or not, we could observe people were having problems with (video games) and we needed to respond to those problems.”
The WHO has said it will include “gaming disorder” in a June update to its International Classification of Diseases (ICD), defining it as a pattern of behaviour “characterized by impaired control over gaming, increasing priority given to gaming over other activities to the extent that gaming takes precedence over other interests and daily activities, and continuation or escalation of gaming despite the occurrence of negative consequences.”
A diagnosis would recognize “significant impairment in personal, family, social, educational, occupational or other important areas of functioning and would normally have been evident for at least 12 months.”
The WHO has been studying the issue since 2014, while the American Psychiatric Association has flagged “internet gaming disorder” for further study and consideration in its Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, but hasn’t yet moved forward with it.
Prof. Jeffrey Derevensky, director of the International Centre for Youth Gambling at McGill University, consulted with the WHO in preparing the upcoming ICD-11 release and says video game addiction is “clearly a growing problem.”
“… I get a call at least once every two weeks from a parent who says, ‘I can’t get him off his computer,’ or ‘I can’t get him off his cellphone because all he wants to do is play these games,’ ” Derevensky says.
“There have been a number of instances where individuals have actually committed suicide because they weren’t able to have access to their computer for gaming.”