Video game addiction: A new diagnosis?
The telltale signs are ominous: teens holing up in their rooms,
ignoring friends, family, even food and a shower, while grades
plummet and belligerence soars. The culprit isn't alcohol or drugs.
It's video games, which for certain kids can be as powerfully
addictive as heroin, some doctors contend.
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.
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
mental illness manual created and published by the American
Psychiatric Association. AMA delegates could vote on the proposal
as early as Monday.
It likely won't happen without heated debate. Video game makers
scoff at the notion that their products can cause a psychiatric
disorder. Even some mental health experts say labeling the habit a
formal addiction is going too far.
Dr. James Scully, the psychiatric association's medical director,
said the group will seriously consider the AMA report in the long
process of revising the diagnostic manual. The current manual was
published in 1994; the next edition is to be completed in
2012.
Up to 90 percent of American youngsters play video games and as
many as 15 percent of them — more than 5 million kids — may be
addicted, according to data cited in the AMA council's
report.
Joyce Protopapas of Frisco, Texas, said her 17-year-old son,
Michael, was a video addict. Over nearly two years, video and
Internet games transformed him from an outgoing, academically
gifted teen into a reclusive manipulator who flunked 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 monthly that insurance won't cover, his mother said.
A support group called On-Line Gamers Anonymous has numerous
postings on its Web site from gamers seeking help. Liz Woolley, of
Harrisburg, Pa., created the site after her 21-year-old son fatally
shot himself in 2001 while playing an online game 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 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
teen-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 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 49-year-old woman who didn't
want her name used to spare her son from ridicule.
Dr. Martin Wasserman, a pediatrician who heads the Maryland State
Medical Society, said the AMA proposal will help raise awareness
and called it "the right thing to do."
But Michael Gallagher, president of the Entertainment Software
Association, said the trade group sides with psychiatrists "who
agree that this so-called 'video-game addiction' is not 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," she said. "He is really a mess."
She said she treats it like any addiction and creating a separate
diagnosis is unnecessary.
Dr. Michael Brody, head of a TV and media committee at the American
Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, agreed. He praised the
AMA council for bringing attention to the problem, but said
excessive video-game playing could be a symptom for other things,
such as depression or social anxieties that already have their own
diagnoses.
"You could make lots of behavioral things into addictions. Why stop
at video gaming?" Brody asked. Why not Blackberries, cell phones,
or other irritating habits, he said.