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WHO to recognize gaming disorder as mental health condition

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Re: WHO to recognize gaming disorder as mental health condition

#21

Post by mabbo »

I don't know whether what I had (have?) meets this WHO definition, but I can tell you that at points in my life, I've had an unhealthy relationship with video games.

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.

Re: WHO to recognize gaming disorder as mental health condition

#22

Post by Grieverheart »

algesten wrote: post #15
mjburgess wrote: post #2

Before the sceptics get in: 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…

> 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. 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.

Most recent studies in psychiatry and social sciences that I have read, even those published in Nature, use sample sizes of around 50 people, which should be considered insufficient. Instead they use various cooked up formulas for correcting for gender/ethnicity etc. Instead, sample sizes should be much bigger. Of course this is not practical or even perhaps impossible. I find this to be a poor excuse, though.

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.

Re: WHO to recognize gaming disorder as mental health condition

#23

Post by mjburgess »

xena wrote: post #20
mjburgess wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ahh, sigh. I was writing with ADHD in mind actually. 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 s…

Honestly I think about half the problem is that psychiatric illnesses don't make people bleed, so there's no way to universally tell something is wrong.

The bane of society, I think, is mentally healthy people.

They run politics but have absolutely no appreciation for what works for non-healthy people. Which is all the people who acutally rely on politics/society.

I think conservatism as a personality is a symptom of good mental health: if you arent able to do something, its lazyness. So you must just need some motivation: either a beating or some money. etc.

That's true if you're mentally healthy. If not then the ways you are failing arent even imaginable from the POV of mental health. And they are as communicable as cancer, or any physical illness.

The last century is full of works by people who have recently taken acid telling everyone how "everything is now differnet" etc. How they couldnt even have imagined the things they took for granted in how their minds work were actually variable.

Every mental illness is its own unique form of acid. And unless you've been on an acid trip, or are very well informed medically, you've no idea what it is like.

Re: WHO to recognize gaming disorder as mental health condition

#24

Post by DanBC »

mjburgess wrote: post #18
DanBC wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Before criticizing modern psychiatry keep in mind: > 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 Resour…

Ahh, sigh. I was writing with ADHD in mind actually. 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 s…

It's weird that you have such a strongly negative reaction to my post.

Especially this bit:

> > 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".

Medication is the Bio bit. "Your children are not wilfully disobedient, please stop hitting them" is the psycho-social bit.

Re: WHO to recognize gaming disorder as mental health condition

#25

Post by taneq »

mjburgess wrote: post #18
DanBC wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Before criticizing modern psychiatry keep in mind: > 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 Resour…

Ahh, sigh. I was writing with ADHD in mind actually. 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 s…

Your points about ADHD requiring a pharmacological approach reminds me of the discussion here: http://lesswrong.com/lw/2as/diseased_thinking_dissolving_que...

Specifically, that the only distinction between 'disease' and 'character flaw' which makes sense is that you can't fix someone's disease by yelling at them.

Re: WHO to recognize gaming disorder as mental health condition

#27

Post by dsacco »

Grieverheart wrote: post #22
algesten wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. 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.

Most recent studies in psychiatry and social sciences that I have read, even those published in Nature, use sample sizes of around 50 people, which should be considered insufficient. Instead they use various cooked up formulas for correcting for gender/ethnicity etc. Instead, sample sizes should be much bigger. Of course this is not practical or even perhaps impossible. I find this to be a poor excuse, though. The ma…

> Most recent studies in psychiatry and social sciences that I have read, even those published in Nature, use sample sizes of around 50 people, which should be considered insufficient.

I disagree with your reasoning even if your conclusion is correct about the validity of those studies. Small sample sizes are not intrinsically bad and there’s no magic number to make sample sizes valid. It’s a sliding scale with statistical significance - with a large enough p value a relatively small sample size doesn’t mean the observed phenomenon isn’t there. In that case I would be more concerned about p value hacking or the researchers “presuming the conclusion from the outset” than the sample size.

Re: WHO to recognize gaming disorder as mental health condition

#28

Post by StanislavPetrov »

mjburgess wrote: post #2

Before the sceptics get in: 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…

>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.

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...

Re: WHO to recognize gaming disorder as mental health condition

#29

Post by mjburgess »

DanBC wrote: post #24
mjburgess wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ahh, sigh. I was writing with ADHD in mind actually. 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 s…

It's weird that you have such a strongly negative reaction to my post. Especially this bit: > > 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". Medication is the Bio bit. "Your children are not wilfully disobedient, please stop hitting them" is the psycho-social bit.

I'm half reacting to a reading of your post that many readers will have, even if it's not one you intended.

On the whole I appreciate you introducing the real prevalence of ADHD, etc.

However the lack of engagement with the reality of treating ADHD and the implied "concerns" is a very easy prelude to a rant about middle class mothers, and the medical establishment.

If I'm a little harsh to you, its only as a stand in for what your post would otherwise be used for: the occasional reader unthinkingly associating it with an attack on effective treatment.

Re: WHO to recognize gaming disorder as mental health condition

#30

Post by drdaeman »

saas_co_de wrote: post #16

Video games are obviously addictive. The way you make money off of games is to make them addictive. There is a direct feedback loop between more addictive games and more profits and so the addictiveness of games can be research, refined, and optimized over time. 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 p…

We should also ban other dangerously addictive activities, such as fiction books, non-video games, sports, DIY hobbies (e.g. electrical engineering, painting or storywriting), pets, hanging out with other people and lots of other things.

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).

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