Not surprising at all, considering all the other things that are considered a mental health problem in this day and age. I wonder if a pill will appear specifically for this ādiseaseā, perhaps to cure an imbalance of the āvideo game chemicalā in the brain?
The best way to cure this simple addiction is to formulate a life with purpose and meaning, and to not be afraid to live it.
Iām with the ESA on this one, doesnāt sound like a good idea.
Likely the same theyād prescribe for someone trying to quit smoking I guess?
WORKSFORME WONTFIX is not a valid excuse to ignore serious mental health issues.
Er, Iām with the WHO on this one. They donāt often get things wrong and people do die as a result of overgaming, or exhibit gambling behaviours/symptoms. Asia has a big problem with it and has regulation specifically to help alleviate the problem.
Here is some more food for thought Chinese internet giant limits online game play for children over health concerns | China | The Guardian
Also, itās not just asia, but a real and growing problem for America as well. I imagine this would be worldwide enough and to all practical intents and purposes would be a disease.
I donāt understand that comment, can you explain please?
The way I understood the ESAās statement was that theyāre not saying āthere is no problemā, but rather āfocusing on the videogame part of the problems these people are having is distracting from the general underlying mental health issues for which gaming is sought out as a coping mechanism in specific casesā. I simply donāt see the huge difference between compulsive gaming, facebooking, forum browsing, porn watching, netflix binging, meme browsing, or whatever else people get sucked into.
Are excessive social media browsing, and porn watching diseases too in your opinion? Imho itās all just different manifestations of the same kind of addiction spiral. All very serious, all in dire need of more funding, research and treatment, but I donāt really see how compartmentalizing the categories and making some official and others not helps solve the underlying issues.
I think its pretty obvious that technology is growing closer to biology.
I think itās quite obvious with AR, VR, people dying from gaming, people dying from fucking selfies and other absurd behaviour that tech is only going to become more dominant and itās quite interesting how invasive the effects are on biology, and how we are evolving right now, to become entirely dependent on technology.
And what happens when that rug is pulled. Possibly the same as standing outside in the snow without clothes or food. Give it time.
Mental illness is not simple, and is not cured with vapid pseudo-philosophy. When you feel compelled to say something like this, ask yourself, am I sharing this thought for somebody elseās benefit, or for my own?
I would argue that is an absurd generalized oversimplification. Yes the tech industry is moving toward BMI, but closer to biology?? Iām not sure where you get that from.
A bunch of very rare and one-off examples, what an epidemic we have here. 
Would you not see these as symptoms and not a cause? A lot of people who i know that you could consider gaming to have negative effect on, were simply using gaming as a coping mechanism to a larger problem. Social Anxiety, Clinical Depression or simply a addictive personality type. A game addiction really is no different to those who gamble to excess, drinks to excess or partakes in anything to the point it becomes self destructive.
I have many friends that game, and the only issues Iāve seen with some of them is the toll it takes on their physical health, not so much mental.
They are all introverted like myself to begin with.
If it effects your physical health then it has already affected your mental health.
I think itās a pretty legit move, people suffer significant physical problems, social life issues, irrationally prioritize things and sometimes die from addiction and an addiction to gaming isnāt any different front any addiction to anything else.
I know itās not simple, my premise is that IMO, video games specifically are not a category of āmental illnessā. I donāt believe personally that addiction is in itself an āillnessā either, though thatās neither here nor there. The point is that to categorise a new āmental illnessā, you have to be able to separate it clearly from similar forms that already exist. Why then would video game addiction be different from porn addiction, or some other escapist addiction? Why even from alcohol or drug addiction?
A true mental illness is certainly not something simple or easy to fix, and I know that very well. But to create a new category of āillnessā for someone that avoids stepping on every third paving stone as they are walking down the street, seems like a gross over-categorisation.
I think youāre missing the bit where experts are involved. Donāt assume this is out of someoneās hat. Heck of a lot of studies ongoing and completed. 7+ billion people do amass a lot of data as wellā¦
Sometimes not enough is known about an illness to create an outright cure. But that doesnāt mean symptoms should not be identified and mitigated as much as possible. And you have to remember, what you hear about condensed into a single headline is a complex process involving thousands of professionals way more knowledgeable about the subject than any sideline spectator.
The belief or feeling that the mind is something separate from the rest of the body is totally unfounded in science, you may as well call it a religious belief. Just like with an obvious physical injury, people have to rely on one another to cure one another.
I wrote a detailed post but I donāt think this is the place for it. Iāll just say that I know from long personal experience around someone with very severe mental issues (that didnāt start severe) that these āexpertsā and the mental health industry itself are by and large unscientific, inconsistent, and often do much more harm than good. When the most common and accepted form of treatment for mental illness in first-world countries is the physiological treatment of a hypothesized (unmeasured) chemical imbalance of an unspecified brain chemical, the diagnosis of which was reached by asking the patient questions and collating āsymptomsā that have no basis in physiology and are, besides being ambiguous, dubiously similar to one another, I think thatās the definition of pseudo-science.
Anyway, all Iāll say about this particular ādisorderā is that I think it is in no way different from any other addiction, can probably be cured the same way as any other addiction, and does not warrant a category. Unless someone can prove to me otherwise, Iāll say that I think this is just an example of someone trying to prove that their job is worth keeping around.
Lousy medical practitioners doesnāt mean the science is bad. But I feel you on this. Like any other people, sometimes doctors just go for the easy answer.
But, in my case at least, I struggled with depression for several years. It wasnāt until I got on medication that I was able to start making important life changes that eventually led to me being back to my old self without the need for medication.
Without the medication (which took some trial and error to find the right one), I probably would have ended up killing myself, no joke. And this all stemmed from a brain injury several years ago.
I donāt think the science is bad, and you are definitely right that there is plenty of medical practitioners who could practice a little humility and recognize that there is a lot that they donāt know, but mental illness is very complex and effects each person in different ways, unlike many other more well understood diseases coming from viruses,bacteria, etc.
Iām glad things have worked for you. And Iām not trying to say that all forms of treatment are unnecessary or harmful - Iāve seen certain things work, to a small degree, at various points in time.
The problem, IMO, is that the foundation of mental health treatment is very unstable. Itās based on the (usually physiological) treatment of something which cannot be identified scientifically or measured in any clear or consistent way. The infrastructure of mental health treatment has expanded (and seems to be continuing to expand at a phenomenal rate) on what I consider to be a largely pseudo-scientific basis. And I say that not because I think I know enough to prove that the current scientific model is wrong, but because there is very little in the way of a scientific model at all, correct or otherwise.
In terms of this particular āvideo gaming disorderā, I think itās a joke to consider it a separate form of āillnessā. When I was a teenager, I used to play counter-strike for 16 hours a day sometimes (thankfully only over a short period of my life, which ended after I convinced myself that I was just running away from life). Now tell me, in this new āvideo gaming disorderā category, which presumably is a category because it warrants some kind of specific treatment, would I have been classified as having this disorder to a substantial degree? If so, what would I be prescribed? Probably a few drugs of some kind, at a minimum. All when I just needed a kick in the butt (which fortunately I was in a position to give to myself).
Iām all for treating real mental illnesses in whatever way works best (even by means, as long as everyone knows the situation clearly and accepts the risks, with treatments that are based on mechanisms that are fundamentally unknown). I donāt really want to get into that because I know thatās a very complex problem and this is not the right place to have a detailed discussion about it. But I think that the idea that āvideo game disorderā is a category unto itself, when thereās no evidence that Iāve seen that proves that excessive video gaming not just a form of dopamine-boosting escapism from difficult life circumstances (the same as almost any other kind of addiction), is ridiculous.
There are some instinctive behavirs that are strongly pronunced in some people and are brutally exploted by the industry.
āInner hamsterā ā Desire to Hoard ā Whales in F2P.
Desire for approval and self importance ā Selfie addict, and people who try to rack up friend counters.
I donāt see a problem with this classification.