Addiction experts say video games an addiction, before backing away

[Farid]

http://www.ibtimes.com/articles/20070624/video-game-addiction.htm

Doctors backed away on Sunday from a controversial proposal to designate video game addiction as a mental disorder akin to alcoholism, saying psychiatrists should study the issue more.

Addiction experts also strongly opposed the idea at a debate at the American Medical Association's annual meeting.

They said more study is needed before excessive use of video and online games -- a problem that affects about 10 percent of players -- could be considered a mental illness.

"There is nothing here to suggest that this is a complex physiological disease state akin to alcoholism or other substance abuse disorders, and it doesn't get to have the word addiction attached to it," said Dr. Stuart Gitlow of the American Society of Addiction Medicine and Mt. Sinai School of Medicine in New York.

A committee of the influential physicians' group had proposed video game addiction be listed as a mental disorder in the American Diagnostic and Statistic Manual of Mental Disorders, a guide used by the American Psychiatric Association in diagnosing mental illness.

Such a move would ease the path for insurance coverage of video game addiction.

Even before debate on the subject began, the committee that made the proposal backed away from its position, and instead recommended that the American Psychiatric Association consider the change when it revises its next diagnostic manual in 5 years.

Well, I guess we won't see a generation of traumatised kids talking about their WoW addicted parents and how it was hard to growing up in a family where leveling up and time attack records were more important than communication.

 

[22psi]

Hmm, I am more addicted to chat/talk about videogames and the industry than playing the games myself.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

Games are clearly not an addiction in the same sense as drugs as there's no withdrawls. Some people may get psychologically addicted, as in WoW, but the medium itself doesn't include pathalogical addiction-causing material. In that respect it's like anything else - shopping has as many addicts as gaming probably has. Probably quite the opposite to an addiction, you can play a game intensely to the point you get bored of it and give up, with it shedding its hold on you. That's something drug and alcohol addicts would be very pleased to have from their afflictions.

 

[Entropy]

Games are clearly not an addiction in the same sense as drugs as there's no withdrawls. Some people may get psychologically addicted, as in WoW, but the medium itself doesn't include pathalogical addiction-causing material. In that respect it's like anything else - shopping has as many addicts as gaming probably has. Probably quite the opposite to an addiction, you can play a game intensely to the point you get bored of it and give up, with it shedding its hold on you. That's something drug and alcohol addicts would be very pleased to have from their afflictions.

Very true.
But then the existance of physical withdrawal symptoms does not define what is addiction.
Simply put, addiction is a condition, a set of behaviour patterns. And some gamers (and a host of other people in other areas) show these.

Notice that it is the American Medical Association, telling the American Psychiatric Association to hold off before accepting the classification.

Regardless of AMA/APA classification rules, the problems are real, and are affecting a sufficient number of people that societies have started to try to find ways to deal with it. Too many potentially useful people are lost to gaming. (Ugly or not, society is a whole lot more tolerant of "useless" people sinking into addiction.)

 

[DudeMiester]

I would think gaming addiction would be in the same league as gambling addiction. Purely psychological, but nevertheless a serious problem.