yep, and we have football disorder, coding disorder, watching television disorder, 40 hours a week job disorder, dying in poverty disorder, bla bla bla.
WHO to recognize gaming disorder as mental health condition
51–60 of 101 posts
Re: WHO to recognize gaming disorder as mental health condition
#52Earlier 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…
I've read a lot of your posts on this thread and appreciate your perspective. I agree with a lot of it. Honest question for you though: isn't it a bit weird to label something as a disorder if 5-10% of the population has it? Isn't it just a fairly standard human existence then? I think that's where a lot of the discomfort comes from.
Re: WHO to recognize gaming disorder as mental health condition
#53https://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/27/health/who-transgender-me...
A man isn't disordered simply for wanting the same things an ordinary woman would want.
Re: WHO to recognize gaming disorder as mental health condition
#54What about HN/Reddit/whatever F5-ing disorder? :-)
Re: WHO to recognize gaming disorder as mental health condition
#55I think that better acknowledgement of mental health conditions is generally a good thing. There's too much stigma around something being labeled as "mental health", when really I think everyone should view their own mental health as a work in progress, just like how physical health always has some room for improvement.
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.
Re: WHO to recognize gaming disorder as mental health condition
#56Video 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…
All I said is that if video games were treated the same as drugs and alcohol they would be banned for minors.
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.
Re: WHO to recognize gaming disorder as mental health condition
#57Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
> We should also ban other dangerously addictive activities, such as fiction books, non-video games, sports, DIY hobbies These can be addicting too, but certain video games can be on an entirely different level, ie. they fulfill many more psychological needs.
I really believe this is really a matter of taste. Don't think there something special about video games - surely they're a very common retreat but by no means an special one. There are people who are addicted to other activities just as bad as some are hooked on games. And even for games - what some would find highly addictive, others would find boring or even disgusting. So I really think there is nothing wrong with video games on their own - the problem is in the heads and games are just what frequently happens to be there.
What triggered my comment is a ban proposal for an extremely wide group, where a significant fraction doesn't have any particular issue with the subject at hand. Even if I'm unaffected by this particular proposal (I'm way past my teen years) I still find such ideas somewhat offensive. I may be naive or stupid but I don't fancy the very thought of someone being deprived of something fairly harmless to them just because others have issues.
Re: WHO to recognize gaming disorder as mental health condition
#58Earlier quoted context omitted.
The most reasonable thing to think about any mental health disorder is whatever the consensus in clinical psychiatry is. 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…
Sounds like you're not familiar with sociology nor macroeconomics literature.
Macroeconomists often can't run experiments, and some kinds of "macro-sociological" theories can't be tested either. That puts them in a fundamentally different epistemological class.
Re: WHO to recognize gaming disorder as mental health condition
#59Earlier 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…
I've read a lot of your posts on this thread and appreciate your perspective. I agree with a lot of it. Honest question for you though: isn't it a bit weird to label something as a disorder if 5-10% of the population has it? Isn't it just a fairly standard human existence then? I think that's where a lot of the discomfort comes from.
Not the parent, and I don't mean this sarcastically, but isn't that akin to saying "Only 5-10% of people fracture a bone, so why bother treating it. It's just a standard part of human existence."?
Re: WHO to recognize gaming disorder as mental health condition
#60Before 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…
Let's take a history of the DSM using trivia here:
1) By context it states still that drugs like LSD and MDMA will lead to psychosis.
2) It directly stated that Marijuana causes psychosis up until some years back (less than a decade).
3) Psychosis NOS (None Otherwise Specified) is used to categorize undesirables when nothing else fits.
4) People were still being forcibly sterilized in California up until less than a decade ago.
5) Modern clinical psychiatry is checklist-based, not evidence-based. If it were evidence-based they'd be basing it on bloodwork and MRI.
6) Recent findings regarding genetics, as well as astrocyte-damage being responsible for schizophrenia trump Freudian-based lunacy.
7) Psychiatric abuse has been common for over 100 years. If you're homosexual, anti-establishment, communist, atheist, Wiccan and more, you've likely been a victim of bias and discrimination. The cold-water baths and ECT to treat such terrible conditions as not being "like everyone else" are true.
8) It's delusional to think that the DSM represents fact -- for instance, the APA has stated that any group of people, large enough, holding a belief, is a religion and thus a protected class -- yet Wiccans, Rastafari and alternative religions are still persecuted like addicts and cults.
As someone who survived the psychiatric establishments in Texas, finally meeting a doctor who started at square one, asking me questions, and rediagnosing me to PTSD and a victim of abuse from the slew of ever-changing diagnoses that my parents lied to the doctors to achieve, I think it's all barbarism, plain and simple. Times are changing, but mental institutions and Big Pharma pushing pills hasn't. Actual therapeutics and investigation are nonexistent. People don't ask the patients and instead rely on testimony from others. Full workups aren't done. Inspection for head trauma, meningitis and more isn't done. And you can pick this apart, and say that "hey those are just isolated possible situations" but the reality is, just like the prison systems, psychiatry is 100% flawed and biased.
For fucks sake, my first doctor around year 2000 had been trained in fucking Russia in the fucking 1950s. You want psychiatry to be true? Give it 20 years for the tech to catch up and doctors to adopt it, then give it to AI to manage rather than flawed, biased humans with motives that aren't in line with the best treatment for a patient.