1. The purpose of DSM/ICD is often to justify financing treatment:
> Chris Ferguson, a professor of psychology at Stetson University ... described the ICD as "the book of real diseases that you can get insurance payments for."
2. Treatment has to be mindful of the specific form of addiction:
> "These are co-morbid conditions," he said. "If you just treat the depression and not gaming, the gaming is likely to come back." This suggests it's a unique condition, he said.
3. No we are not "medicializing everything":
> But Ferguson argued that, if it is a disorder, it seems to be very rare.
NB.
Before criticizing modern psychiatry keep in mind:
1. mental health patients are extreme in their dysfunction, never common.
2. the operation of the brain (, nervous system, etc.) in its interaction with its environment is as liable to breaking as any other part of the body
3. modern clinical psychiatry is an evidenced-based, research-driven field which treats and forms diagnoses on the basis of decades of research into any particular condition. It isnt the 1950s.
> 1. mental health patients are extreme in their dysfunction, never common.
I agree with what you're saying, but the US does have a problem of over-testing, over-diagnosis, and over-treating illness. Not just mental ill health, but everything.
In the US about 10% of children have ADHD
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3489818/
> Based on the Heath Resources and Services Administration's National Survey of Children's Health, the percentage of children aged 4–17 years diagnosed with ADHD increased from 7.8% in 2003 to 9.5% in 2007, representing a 21.8% increase in just 4 years (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention 2010).
An estimates 3million US children take stimulant medication:
> Experts estimate that approximately 60% of children with ADHD are treated with prescription stimulants (Center for Disease Control and Prevention 2005a); therefore, approximately three million children in this country take stimulants for problems with focusing. At the same time, many studies have revealed the numerous adverse effects associated with prescription stimulants when they are used inappropriately.
These numbers are a bit worrying, especially if medication alone is being used, and it's not provided as a package of bio-psycho-social treatment.
Up to 10% children really do have ADHD which is a delay in the development of the frontal lobe. Such a delay seems "somewhat common" amongst humans.
More than half catch up, leaving upto 5% of adults with some form of ADHD.
ADHD is serious. It is a severe impairment to planning, self-management, emotional regulation, etc. You are likely to be impoverished without substantial resources to rely on (family, etc.).
> are a bit worrying > it's not provided as a package of bio-psycho-social treatment.
ADHD researchers (serious neuroscientists & clinical psychiatrists) have for DECADES tried "biosocial blah blah". It has failed. ADHD is not a failure of child training (ie., parents "Raising Their Child Right!!!").
Overwhelmingly the effective treatment for ADHD is pharmocological. At this point comments like yours, along with the media hysteria, are doing real harm to children actually getting treatment.
The problem we have with ADHD is significant under treatment and under diagnosis.
It turns out all those "useless" people joked about in human history have not just been failures of character: in need of "social" intervention. They have had a physical impairment, a delay in their brain's development. Not Fixable by a good beating, or whatever the touchy-feely equivalent is.
The suggestion that a child with a broken leg not receive crutches would be absolutely outrageous. Or a person with cancer not receive a daily pill treatment. The very same outrage should be felt here in the suggestion that people with ADHD not receive medication vital to their ability to even pay attention to their lessons (goals, etc.). Vital to their ability to socailize (ie., control their frustation in ways that doesnt alientate other children). And therefore vital to their future success.
Yes there does need to be a fundamental reorganization to western education systems to, from the ground up, be aware of how wide-spread developmental issues are -- and to build in fundamental support structures.
However this isnt a "treatment" for ADHD. There is no cure. This is just bracing the crutches. Overwelmingly the research over the last 30 years has shown the only significant impact on ADHD is pharmocological.
I'd argue this is a symptom. The root disease is the profits to be made from various testing positive.
I'd add that it's aided by the fact that most people believe the doc can (and should) script you a pill for just about everything. Prevention? That's not going to happen. The patients know it, the doctors know it, and the insurance company pays for it.
Do I think everyone should have access to healthcare? Yes. But everyone should also be mindful if personal health. That isn't the case. And since soneone else is always paying for it, and the med pro are too broken to push back, we get what we have.
Illness as a badget of honor.
But isn't modern clinical psychiatry marred by the same problems social or economic sciences are? Ultimately you are studying/interpreting human behaviour, which doesn't lend itself well to quantisation or categorising.
That is the point. It is so overwhelmingly well-researched, that even if its conclusions are wrong, no lay person is going to be in a position to have "an argument" that hasn't already been considered and researched and folded into the consensus.
This isnt the case with social sciences, and it isnt the case with macroeconomic policy. Both of these are about groups of humans, not individual humans, and are fundamentally about behaviour in the face of cultural/economic/social changes. That kind of analysis is purely speculative and historically accidental in the way that giving people adderall and measuring their cognitive performance isn't.
A man on the street may well have good reasons to speculate differently about the evolution of his society that those speculations produced in some university in a foreign country.
A man on the street can have no good reason to act against the consensus of research-based medicine. To do so is to fly blindly into an area of profound research depth and consideration.
We have a problem today of these domains being equivocated. About people believing they are experts because the "Experts" they see are really political speculators and commentators of macro-cultural changes. And so everyone thinks everything is speculation.
This is profoundly not the case for, let's say, what the best treatment plan for bipolar disorder, adhd, autism, clincial depression, psychosis, etc. etc. etc. is.
...which has folded in lifetimes of research on the way the brain works, the way that drugs work, CBT, social therapies, counselling, etc. etc. etc. ...
An opinion on what "should be done" about a family member with bipolar disorder may as well be an opinion about what should be done about their thyroid problem, carpal fracture, lymphoma, etc.
The matter of fact is, we know very little about how the brain works. We certainly have some big picture on how the brain functions, but we are very far from grasping the chemistry.
Your post was okay until your last point. While it isn't the 1950s, its absurd to contend that "modern clinical psychiatry" isn't massively subjective in terms of both treatment and diagnosis. The fact is that the vast majority of psychiatrists reflexively shovel pills at those perceived to be afflicted with poorly-understood mental disorders. In reality, we are only beginning to scratch the surface when it comes to understanding how the brain works, let alone the human psyche. One of the most egregious illustrations of this fact are the over 1 million children under the age of 5 taking psychiatric drugs. We still don't know the long term outcomes of our tinkering with the developing brains of infants and small children, and its hubris (or worse) to pretend that we do.
https://www.cchrint.org/psychiatric-drugs/children-on-psychi...
For me, and maybe others as well, it's about having control over something and feeling a sense of accomplishment, feeling like I'm achieving something. Video games give you that. For a small cost ($20-$50), you can have pure escapism from reality, think about things other than your shitty life and depression and instead feel yourself accomplish goals, achieve success, win. Unlike drugs or alcohol, it doesn't end- you can just keep coming back without paying anything. There's no chemical hangover, no blood test for it, no social stigma like drugs have. It's perfect.
My underlying problems have been dealt with now, but I still have to limit how long I play games for. The high is still there and I recognize it well. I just don't need it like I once did.
Looking back at my high school days, I had a good friend who was into drugs. I got him into EverQuest. I wish he'd gotten me into drugs instead- there are well understood paths out of drug addiction. And that game messed the both of us up.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/addicted-suicide-over-everquest...
I remember seeing the Everquest demo trailer video in an Electronic Boutique store and reading about it in PC magazine, I was astounded by the sheer level of depth. Especially the part where you could setup a physical real estate and sell stuff you gathered form the virtual world (I'm not sure if this existed in Everquest, just recall seeing bits of it in a magazine).
The WHO is way behind the curve here.
If society treated video games the same as alcohol and drugs they would already be banned for minors. Eventually they probably will be.
I'm no expert on the matter, but I think you're completely missing the point. The keyword here is "gaming addiction" not "video games". Please, for the love of all the sanity that's still left out there, don't mistake one with another. There is a lot of things that one suffering from behavioral disorders could get addicted to. Unlike substance addictions (which are complicated matter), games (or overindulging in escapist fiction or having dozens of pets) are more of a symptom than an underlying cause.
If you'd try to ban just about everything that one could get hooked onto, it won't help the person a little bit with their impulse control. It would just make their and everyone else's lives dull and boring, probably leading to much more unhealthy situations (just my guess, though).
Video games are just as addictive as alcohol, cigarettes, or cocaine and just as destructive in terms of seriously impairing the ability of addicts to function in a socially acceptable way.
If you think books or hobbies are as addictive or destructive as video games that is a matter of opinion, but I think most reasonable people (like mental health professionals) would disagree with you.
Even if any of the things you listed were as addictive or destructive as video games they are all missing one crucial aspect: the ability to optimize and enhance addictive properties over time.
There are billions of dollars being poured into enhancing and refining video games (making them more addictive) every year and the technology to do this (tracking player responses at a minute level and adapting games to maximize profits) can not be applied to any of the other things you listed the same as it can to video games.
These can be addicting too, but certain video games can be on an entirely different level, ie. they fulfill many more psychological needs.
Also, maybe a social media disorder is next on the list?
WRT
>In one study, he found that when kids stopped being addicted to games, their depression and anxiety got better.
( 1 )
Is this study repeatable? (or does it suffer the fate of many (75%) psychology experiments that cannot be replicated [1]
( 2 )
Instagram, Facebook , -- would those, potentially, addiction-fueled activities, ever become subject to the WHO recommendation ?
[ 1 ] https://www.theguardian.com/science/2015/aug/27/study-delive...
I had all the signs of addiction, I stopped hanging out with friends, I stayed awake all night, ate poorly and gave up in school. More than once I recognized my issue and smashed the CD, even one time glued it to a piece of paper and put it on our bulletin board for my mom to see. Two weeks later I'd be back playing at 3am.
I needed help but I don't think my parents knew what to do.
Stereotypes aside, a lot of Korean teenagers (for me, counter-strike and an early 2000 korean MMO called N-age ㅋㅋㅋ) went through this cycle. It was a form of escape, especially as a kid dealing with a stressful environment, I can see why some of us form a special bond with video games.
Another contributing factor is if in that environment, the prospect of earning six digit salary as a pro gamer is very real with poor job prospects in a hyper competitive society. The industry is rife with health issues that is conveniently ignored and unfortunately "mental disorders" are still viewed with the stigma one would attach to institutionalized patients, although its improving thanks to organizations like WHO setting a standard.
Similar to how some people believe depression is not a mental disorder because it's not "physical" and that they just need to think more "positive" like the non-depressed people, I think any sort of addiction, be it drugs or games needs to be addressed from a medical stand point of view.
For mild cases, I think it's fine to say that playing video games obsessively is potentially problematic (and in this case, I think "mental health" is the obvious category for that sort of problem), just like how not getting enough exercise can be problematic for physical health.
When it gets bad enough to the point that people feel out of control of their lives, it absolutely deserves to be called a mental health problem, and it would be incredibly frustrating to seek professional help and hear "your problem isn't real", when it clearly is causing suffering. Acknowledging that you have a mental health problem and seeking professional help is already hard enough.
Whether you use terms like "mental health disorder" or "mental illness" feels like just an issue of semantics, and my understanding is it's often more an indication of severity rather than being something fundamentally different. Just because you acknowledge a thing called "gaming disorder" doesn't mean it needs to be treated with medication or any kind of extensive treatment; you can still apply reason within any individual case about what the right course of action is. But if it's not even in the vocabulary, there's no reasonable way for the medical community to talk about it and understand it.
Then extreme sports go next? "Base jumping addiction" (deadly!) or let's just go big and make "adrenaline junkie" a serious medical condition? Who in Sci-Fi got this right?
I don't really care how we go about working the medical system to enable this.
Oh please, then I assume every hobby in the world can be considered "hobby-name disorder". If it's something that help the millennium generation to relax and free their mind a few minutes /hours and if the society doesn't find something to come and reach the same level of satisfaction we found the "solution", it's a mental disorder... We really evolved... NOT
