From WN

The World Health Organization is prepared to classify “gaming disorder” as a mental health problem for its upcoming 2018 update to the International Classification of Diseases, according to CBS News.

“How serious is the problem? It’s an epidemic,” licensed marriage and family therapist Paula-Jo Husack told CBS San Francisco.

Husack said the designation was overdue and that addiction to video games and smartphones were a hidden but widespread issue.

The tentative draft of WHO’s 11th update to the ICD says that a gaming disorder “is of sufficient severity to result in significant impairment in personal, family, social, educational, occupational or other important areas of functioning.”

Husack said that common symptoms for both children and adults include social isolation, trouble transitioning between thoughts, a reduction in empathy, loss of appetite, and loss of sensory perception.

The WHO said that those symptoms must be persistent for at least a year before doctors can diagnose the case as a gaming disorder, but did say that a diagnosis could be made sooner if the symptoms are severe.

Video game enthusiasts Joshua Parrish said that anything can be taking “to that extreme,” along with “Alcohol could be consumed that way, casinos, gambling.”

Officials from WHO have not made a final decision on whether or not gaming disorder would be included as part of the 2018 ICD.

Gregory Hartl is a spokesman for the WHO and said the new ICD-11 entry on gaming disorder would “include only a clinical description and not prevention and treatment options.”

Hartl said the ICD was the “basis for identification of health trends and statistics globally and the international standard for reporting diseases and health conditions. It is used by medical practitioners around the world to diagnose conditions and by researchers to categorize conditions.”

The list aims to make it easier for scientists to share and compare information between hospitals, regions, and countries about health issues while enabling healthcare workers to compare data for the same location over different time periods.

Public health experts also use the ICD to help track the number of deaths and diseases.

The existing version of the ICD was endorsed by the decision-making body of WHO, the World Health Assembly, in 1990 and is used by more than 100 countries around the world as of 2017.

“Inclusion of a disorder in ICD is a consideration which countries take into account when making decisions on the provision of health care and allocation of resources for prevention, treatment, and rehabilitation,” Hartl said.

By adding the gaming disorder to the ICD, the WHO now makes it so that that is an official diagnosis that can be used by healthcare workers.

Chris Ferguson is a professor of psychology at Stetson University in Florida whose research includes video games and other media violence and said the ICD is “the book of real diseases that you can get insurance payments for.”

Though Ferguson warned that internet gaming disorder is “totally different” from the general gaming disorder and that he didn’t think WHO’s proposal was a reflection of the consensus in the field about the debate between scholars.

Douglas A. Gentile is a professor of psychology at Iowa State University and said that he disagreed and hopes the inclusion of gaming disorder would “generate a lot more discussion about what’s the best way to define it” and “what’s the best way to treat it.”

Ferguson said that if gaming disorder is an actual disorder, it seems to be rare since the numbers cited in most studies say that it has a rate of around 1% or less for individuals who are gamers that “have anything that looks like this type of disorder.”

“There are people out there who overdo video games,” Ferguson said, “but people overdo lots of stuff, so why games? Why not just have a general behavioral addiction category that can apply to anything that people overdo?”

WHO’s spokesman Hartl said that since the “use of the internet, computers, smartphones, and other electronic devices have dramatically increased over recent decades,” and while there are benefits to those advancements, “health problems as a result of excessive use have also been documented” and there is “increasing demand for treatment in different parts of the world.”

–WN.com, Maureen Foody

For more on this story and video go to: https://article.wn.com/view/2017/12/28/Excessive_Video_Gaming_Will_be_Recognized_As_Official_Disord/