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from the today-I-learned-that-gaming-disorder-is-real dept.
Increase in gaming disorder in UK forcing people into private treatment at home or abroad
Jan Willem Poot, 40, a former addict turned entrepreneur who set up the clinic, said it was seeing a 20-30% annual increase in people – mainly young men – coming in with gaming dependency. "Also, in the beginning it was eight to 10 hours of playing but at this moment we have got kids who game 18-19 hours a day. They sometimes go weeks without showers and are not eating."
Gaming disorder is defined by the World Health Organization as a pattern of persistent or recurrent gaming behaviour so severe that it takes "precedence over other life interests". Symptoms include impaired control over gaming and continuation or escalation of gaming despite negative consequences.
(Score: 2) by Magic Oddball on Tuesday August 20 2019, @05:57AM (1 child)
Addiction-based behavior is completely different from OCD. In an addiction, the person engages in a pleasurable activity in place of healthy coping skills for daily life stress, often due to an undiagnosed mental illness.
In OCD, the person can have healthy coping skills for stress like anyone else, but experiences obsessive distressing thoughts or severe anxiety, and compulsively performs neutral or even harmful behavior (e.g. checking knobs on a stove every 20 minutes, excessive skin picking) that temporarily alleviates the anxiety. (The Wikipedia entry [wikipedia.org] describes it much better than I do.)
(Score: 2) by VLM on Wednesday August 21 2019, @01:21PM
Well, OK. I guess I always kinda think of popular named "gaming addiction" as being stuff like checking your farmville every 15 minutes to make sure the tomatoes haven't rotted that would seem to be a OCD like illness. I have a relative who was like that, otherwise very normal but got extremely weird for a couple years about checking her farm even at holiday parties and stuff, exactly like your stove knob checking example. She seems normal now and doesn't farmville so like many addictions or OCD stuff sometimes it just goes away?
The FPS players get an adrenaline hit once in a while, which should be fun, but aren't most "conventionally styled as gaming addicts" really bored and unhappy while playing grind games? They seem that way, in the few I've seen and met.
There probably are many "conventionally styled in the media as gaming addicts" who are OCD or addicts. I bet theres more OCD victims than actual addicts, although there seems to be little to google for because I'm not sure self reporting and self treatment reflects the overall population.