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Doctor Urges AMA To Classify Gaming Addiction
Doctor Mario writes "The AMA has issued a set of findings and recommendations (Word document) which follow a lengthy look at possible connections between gaming and violence, as well as gaming addiction. Ars Technica has a very good summary of the report, which suggests that gaming addiction is likely to be a subset of Internet addiction 'as it most frequently occurs in players of MMORPGs. In both of these addictions, the current definition is currently informal — the described symptoms actually most closely resemble pathological gambling, rather than an addiction. In either case, the report notes, "there is currently insufficient research to definitively conclude that video game overuse is an addiction."' The report also recommends that Internet and videogame addiction be included in a revision to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders."
I hate when uneducated folk try to make this argument.
An addiction to something you find pleasurable may not have a few negative withdrawal effects, but EVERYTHING else is the same, including the PHYSICAL changes in the brain.
I wish I could provide a compelling argument for you, but you obviously have no background in neuroscience, and would thus have no idea what was being argued.
As a professor who specializes in mental health at a major university, I have to say I'm incensed by this. It's completely ridiculous.
What you're seeing with this is a confluence of things that are dangerous in their ability to feed off of each other:
1. Political sensationalism.
2. The whole witchhunt-in-the-name-of-children thing.
3. Luddite ignorance.
4. Rampant problems with psychiatric classification, including overpathologizing and a failure to see the forest for the trees when it comes to what underlying problems are.
The document that was posted is a joke--it starts from the assumption that videogames are an inherent problem, and works from that standpoint. Are some people addicted to videogames? Sure--but people are addicted to all sorts of things (e.g., gambling, videogames, food, clothes, sex). It's not the games, it's the people, or some interaction. Do aggressive videogames increase aggressive thoughts or feelings? Sure, but how much? I'm sure that playing football increases aggressiveness much more than video games, but you don't see studies published on the fact that playing football increases aggressive emotion a teeny-itsy-bitsy bit immediately afterwards, for 15 minutes, with an incredibly sensitive measure of minute changes in such things.
Whether this is in DSM-V remains to be seen. There is some recognition in the DSM-V planning committees of problems such as this in psychiatric classification, and there hopefully will be healthy resistance to it. But the DSM is fundamentally a political document, and as such, is suspceptible to nonsense such as this.
http://docs.google.com/Doc?id=dhjjdf9j_5c2cch4
Addiction is characterized by uncontrolled, compulsive use. Generally it has to be interfering with normal social functioning to warrant concern as well.
So if you watch TV or play games for a couple hours a night, but don't mind too much when you can't and it doesn't interfere with your life, that's not an addiction.
However, if you spend 48 hours straight playing a game and die of a venous thrombosis, or lose your job because you can't stand to miss your soaps, that probably is.