ednesday afternoons have become a ritual for 15-year-old Sadmir Perviz. It's a circuitous route from home in Perth to the Fiona Stanley Hospital - but it's worth it, he says, to sit down for a game of Dungeons & Dragons with people he may not know but with whom he shares a great deal in common.
Sadmir and his board game companions are just some of the 300 patients at the gaming disorder clinic, Australia's only publicly-run institution of its type, helping patients wean themselves off excessive online gaming habits.
The room where they meet is a simple space in a faceless hospital but in the corner, there's a pile of boardgames on a chair. Jenga, Uno and Sushi Go are also popular choices at the informal group which is attended by both patients and clinicians.
It's a bit of a departure for the 15-year-old who until a couple of months ago preferred to play games with friends online for 10 hours a day.
"It feels completely different," says Sadmir. "You get to roll the dice instead of clicking a button. You can interact with people, so you actually know who's there rather than just being on a call with random people."
Read the full article on BBC.
In the past few years internet addiction (IA) and internet gaming disorder (IGD) have become very frequent, leading to many personality and psychiatric disorders including low self-esteem, impulsivity, poor sleep quality, mood disorder, and suicide. IA has been included in Appendix III of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual for Mental Disorders (DSM-5) as IGD. In addition, IA leads to many neuroanatomical and neurochemical alterations including cortical thinning of various components of the brain and altered dopaminergic reward circuitry.
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As this 60 Minutes report discovers, you can have too much of a good thing. What's being called “Internet Addiction Disorder” is ruining lives and even changing the way our brains process information. Worse still, experts are seeing dangerous signs in toddlers.
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