Can playing too many video games be a mental health condition? In some circumstances, the World Health Organization thinks that it can be, 91av has learned.
The WHO is to include gaming disorder in its International Classification of Diseases for the first time. This widely used diagnostic manual was last updated in 1990, and the latest version – called ICD-11 – is set to be published in 2018.
The wording of the gaming disorder entry that will be included in ICD-11 is yet to be finalised, but the draft currently lists a variety of criteria clinicians could use to determine if a person’s gaming has become a serious health condition. According to this draft, someone has gaming disorder if they give increasing priority to gaming “to the extent that gaming takes precedence over other life interests”, and that they will continue to game despite negative consequences.
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Additionally, the draft says that adverse gaming behaviour will normally need to have continued for at least a year before a person’s diagnosis can be confirmed.
“Health professionals need to recognise that gaming disorder may have serious health consequences,” says Vladimir Poznyak at the WHO’s Department of Mental Health and Substance Abuse. Most people who play video games don’t have a disorder, just like most people who drink alcohol don’t have a disorder either. However, in certain circumstances overuse can lead to adverse effects, says Poznyak.
Detrimental overuse
The WHO first began considering gaming disorder as a medical condition a decade ago. Through consultation with mental health professionals, the agency has decided to officially recognise gaming disorder in its next diagnostic manual, but not other conditions linked to technology, such as smartphone addiction or internet addiction. “There is simply a lack of evidence that these are real disorders,” says Poznyak.
The prevalence of gaming disorder is largely unknown. A range of criteria and definitions exist, and estimates of the proportion of gamers who have a problem range from 0.2 per cent up to 20 per cent, depending on which study you read.
“This is a very big discrepancy. The reason this work is so important is because it will allow standardisation of diagnostic criteria across the world,” says at Nottingham Trent University in the UK.
But at Duke University in North Carolina worries that official recognition of gaming disorder could lead to the diagnosis being misapplied. “Tens, perhaps hundreds, of millions of recreational gamers without severe impairment will likely be mislabelled and overtreated,” he says.
“Soon we may have calls for ‘shopping disorder’, ‘jogging disorder’, ‘workaholic disorder’, ‘binge watching disorder’ and my own personal favourite ‘beach bum disorder’,” says Frances. “Everything people passionately like doing can be degraded into fake mental illness.”
